J. G. Ballard Quotes

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

For me writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.

I write because I don't know how to ask my questions any other way.

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

I also started writing songs because I had this burning activity in my heart and had to express myself.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.

If I didn't have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.

Writing gave me a life.

I think, in general, I find writing to be very therapeutic and singing in itself to be really therapeutic.

I've been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.

We all battling different things. Me? I'm just able to channel that through my music.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

I've always been the person who has needed a creative outlet.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?