Short Story Writers From England

"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."

"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."

"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 Do not publish.”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."

"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."

"Human beings today … are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City [London's Wall Street], the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that."

"He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot. Soon enough, one of the Americans would be shot down into Lunghua Camp. Jim tried to decide which of the ruined buildings would best conceal his body. Carefully eked out, the kit and equipment could be bartered with Basie for extra sweet potatoes for months to come, and even perhaps a warm coat for the winter. There would be sweet potatoes for Dr. Ransome, whom Jim was determined to keep alive. He rocked on his heels and listened to an old woman crying in the nearby ward. Through the window was the pagoda at Lunghua Airfield. Already the flak tower appeared in a new light. For another hour Jim stood in line with the missionary widows, watched by the sentry. Dr. Ransome and Dr. Bowen had set off with Sergeant Nagata to the commandant's office, perhaps to be interrogated. The guards moved around the silent camp with their roster boards, carrying out repeated roll-calls. The war was about to end and yet the Japanese were obsessed with knowing exactly how many prisoners they held. Jim closed his eyes to calm his mind, but the sentry barked at him, suspecting that Jim was about to play some private game of which Sergeant Nagata would disapprove."

"The two parachutes fell towards the burial mounds. Already a squad of Japanese soldiers in a truck with a steaming radiator sped along the perimeter road, on their way to kill the pilots. Jim wiped the dust from his Latin primer and waited for the rifle shots. The halo of light which had emerged from the burning Mustang still lay over the creeks and paddies. For a few minutes the sun had drawn nearer to the earth, as if to scorch the death from the fields. Jim grieved for these American pilots, who died in a tangle of their harnesses, within sight of a Japanese corporal with a Mauser and a single English boy hidden on the balcony of this ruined building. Yet their end reminded Jim of his own, about which he had thought in a clandestine way ever since his arrival at Lunghua. He welcomed the air raids, the noise of the Mustangs as they swept over the camp, the smell of oil and cordite, the deaths of the pilots, and even the likelihood of his own death. Despite everything he knew he was worth nothing. He twisted his Latin primer, trembling with a secret hunger that the war would so eagerly satisfy."

"The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking the world was anything else."

"His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key that would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book."

"Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies."

"Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted."

"Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening."

"The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it ... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty."

"'It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.'"

"In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement."

"In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape."

"Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks."

"The more arid and effectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspect of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' psychopathology."