British - Author | November 15, 1930 - April 19, 2009
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.
J. G. Ballard
HonestyTruthComfortEnemyMoral
Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
HonestyThoughtTrueHonesty IsMost
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
HonestyPoetryMovementStarting
I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.
WifeDeathWoundedTerribly
I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is 'boring.' The future is going to be boring.
FutureBoringOne WordUpGoingSum
Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
LikeShouldNovelistsScientists
One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight.
LifeHomeSchoolRestRealityStage
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
GreatImaginationMindPressureFelt
My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.
SocialFoundMiddle-ClassDidUntil
I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.
PeopleMeKnowNowLivingWhy
I admired anyone who could unsettle people.
PeopleWhoAdmiredCouldAnyone
I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on!
EyesDayThinkYouImportantThree
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict J. G. Ballard quotes