Novelists From England

"[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy."

"[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives..."

"[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept."

"[Priest at Hale's cremation] "...our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.""

"… it was the little things which tripped you up."

"[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken.""

"[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin."

"There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love when one finds it."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?"

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition."

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."

"It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution."

"He turned a mirror on our Super-Cannes world and revealed transparent dysfunctional creations playing out bit parts in a play with no author. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it."

"When J. G. Ballard, who passed away Sunday, at the age of seventy-eight, was trying to place “Crash,” his dystopian masterpiece of “auto” eroticism, with a publisher, he received a note with a rejected manuscript: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” He regarded it as a sign of "complete artistic success.""

"The NME online has reported the demise of JG Ballard with the headline: 'Klaxons, Joy Division inspiration JG Ballard dies' It is not hard to imagine the ghost of Ballard smiling ruefully, as if this confirmed his every pessimistic thought about the bland inanity of modern culture. He's hardly dead five minutes and he is already being mislabelled for the culturally illiterate, suffering the same fate as Philip K Dick, the wildly original and imaginative science fiction novelist forever misremembered as "author of Bladerunner"."

"Jim the man and Ballard the writer is a walking paradox, a ragbag of contradiction. Jim is quiet spoken, Ballard outspoken. Jim is moderate, Ballard frequently obscene. Jim can see meaning in the smallest thing. … Sometimes I think if Jim were running the universe what a benign place it would be. Yet the world of his characters is anything but benign. They are affectionless individuals who insist on the meaninglessness of life."

"Referring to the death, 20 years ago, of his close friend, the psychologist Chris Evans, his voice drops to a whisper. This may seem like a contradiction in a man who has written some of the most apocalyptic visions of human demise. As a writer, he has often said, he has followed Conrad's dictum — immersed himself in destruction and swum."

"Ballard has never been a typical sci-fi writer. Science fiction was born of mid-twentieth century optimism; it reflected an interest in technology, the future, outer space, which quickly bored him. … Ballard is an iconoclast and absurdist. Influenced by the Surrealists, who used the unconscious to wage war on society and art, he strives to codify the experiences of the senses, to anatomize the mythologies of the psyche."

"A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water."

"Over the last 50 years, Ballard's indiscriminate and unflinching gaze has worked hard to penetrate the myriad surface realities of our disturbed modernity and to tap into its unconscious energies."

"Some people didn't like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am — trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature — then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it's weird or it's cold."

"In wartime Shanghai I saw so many horrors … Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is, we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us."

"Dalí went on shocking the bourgeoisie till the end. The others, Ernst, Magritte, were all accepted into the critical fold as serious painters. Only Dalí held out till the end. He just didn't give a damn."

"God was a clever idea … The human race came up with a winner there."

""If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”"

"The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself."

"Sooner or later, all games become serious."

"She's one of those people who flinch from the very idea of happiness — in her mind nothing could be more boring or bourgeois."

"Everywhere you look — Britain, the States, western Europe — people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake — a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation."

"Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems."

"Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us. … People will still work — or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them. … But how do you energize people, give them back some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you're still groggy from last night's sleeping pill. Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. … Crime, and transgressive behavior — by which I mean all activities which aren't necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction."

"The future rushes towards us like a tennis player charging the net."

"Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves."

"I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide."

"Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War..."

"Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement."

"The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling booth. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software."

"Perhaps our own fin-de-siècle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists."

"The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime."