J. G. Ballard Quotes

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

It's good to be employable, but I hope to show the truth. The paintings seem true because nobody wants me to do them.

Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

The hardest thing is spending twelve hours a day accommodating the rest of the world, then going home at night and criticizing it. I would be curious about what I'd write if I didn't have to worry about offending.

I always like to vent and tell the truth in my music.

The people I'm inspired by and I listen to are all ballsy, and I feel like I'm closer to an artist when they're open and honest.

I just go where it feels the most honest to go; then I deal with people thinking it's weird afterwards.

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.