J. G. Ballard Quotes

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

For me, I value connection a lot, talking to people and connecting. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy having my own time, but I think it's really important to have that connection, so living on Mars would be a struggle for me.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

I'm not crazy about having lots of time to myself. Whenever I come back from filming away, I immediately want to go and see my friends and my family and re-establish my life. I can fill time when I'm alone, but I love being around other people.

I'd always lived with people - my family, or had people living with me, because I'd never liked being on my own.

I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

No man is an island, as they say. No. I've tried it. I've gone on retreats at various times in my life for three or four or five days. I was desperate to get out of there and talk to somebody. But I fly fish a lot, and I can only do that really by myself. I find I'm never lonesome when I'm on a river, far from it, but it's a lonely practice.

Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

I'm so happy to be around people. I just really like people, and being a freelancer can be lonely during the day, when you're at home trying to write anything you can.

I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.

All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

I love people. I hate to be by myself.

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

I want to be around people, not crickets.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

If loneliness is part of our essence, that is, our essential nature, that is only because of the way, in practical terms, we actually exist; that is, the way we move and work and live in the world.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.

Writing can be a very solitary profession, and when deadlines are looming, it's tempting to glue myself to my desk, but I try to make sure I get out a few times a month with friends just so I don't forget what it means to be social.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

A man by himself is in bad company.