J. G. Ballard Quotes

Sometimes... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass... and we are you.

For me, fantasy has always been a means of exploring reality: it explores the fact that your internal life, your dreams and the weird images and the things that come to you are things that are actually important tools for dealing with real issues.

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.

We are what we think…With our thoughts we make the world.

I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we've made of them...The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

As you are, so is the world.

Where am I when I'm not in reality or in my imagination?

I'm not here now. This isn't happening. You're just visiting a dream of mine.

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn't stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination.

I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.

Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.

The true nature of the world was weirder than any bizarre fabric that anyone might weave from the warp and weft of imagination's loom.

I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.

Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

We live in condensations of our imagination

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

Color, in the outward world, answers to feeling in man; shape, to thought; motion, to will. The dawn of day is the nearest outward likeness of an act of creation; and it is, therefore, also the closest type in nature for that in us which most approaches to creation--the realization of an idea by an act of the will.