J. G. Ballard Quotes

Most people settle because they don't like themselves enough.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.

People who say, "I don't know what to do," usually aren't inspired enough to make it happen.

Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

Executives and studios really like to have control over their product. They panic or they're not secure enough to trust in the powers of really amazing improv people.

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

People have to go through what they have to go through. I think in some cases you sort of bring things on yourself and that's what you want it to be than that's the way it is.

You can't worry about pleasing other people; you have to please yourself.

What ends up happening is people form images and the image they form is, in some ways, what they want it to be. The idea of trying to correct the image is something I'm not interested in doing.

As for the Kristen Stewart comparisons, I just don't think that's fair. I thought she was great in On The Road and Into The Wild. But she's got enough people scrutinising her without me adding my take.

I think that things like curses or whatever - those labels - come from belief systems, universal belief systems. So when you get a global consciousness of something, then that becomes a quote-unquote "truth" for everybody. You know, "This is what happens in the Kennedy family." "This is what happens with the Hemingways." And the more people believe in it, the more it kind of resuscitates the problem; it keeps bringing life to this idea that a curse exists that you can never get out from under.

No one knows what is going to happen in the next few minutes, and yet people still go forward, because they have trust, because they have faith.

It's important to meet with the people who can shape future events, and who might be causing a current problem. And to ignore them means that the problem will continue.

I am interested in details. If you go into anything far enough, you get into the details of it, and people turn out to be interested in what makes things work.

Pronounce your limitations vigorously enough and they're yours.

If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.

After all, the only thing that is going to save mankind is if enough people live their lives for something or someone other than themselves.

No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

Andrew Creighton, who ran Europe for us and who now runs the company day-to-day, would always go to the people he would hire and say, "Look, I don't know what it is, but whatever this guy says comes true because he's got some sort of weird self-fulfilling-prophecy thing." And that's exactly right. The reason I was so bombastic or whatever was because you have to believe it.

It seems like there's never enough famous white people among comic in Hollywood.

I must dissent emphatically from any proposal to spend any money on preparing a statue of me, more especially at a time when people do not have enough food and clothing.