J. G. Ballard Quotes

When you grumble about a taxi being dirty, people your own age will absolutely agree with you, whereas younger people say, 'You should be so lucky to have a taxi - I walk to work!' So I have lots of young friends, who fortunately don't treat me as a guru, a person that knows all the answers.

My folks were raised pure prohibitionist. They were very good people, with high moral standards - but very repressed. There was no hugging and kissing in my home.

I come from a pretty working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Hard work was just expected of you. It wasn't some noble thing you did; it was a prerequisite. It's what a man did. You get up, you put on your boots, and you work hard. We've lost a lot of that, I'm afraid.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced.

I called all adults by their first names, and my mum was just another adult. I was the firstborn of my generation in the family, but because I was so close to my parents in age, they treated me with a kind of adult respect. They talked to me as an equal.

I come from Beverley in East Yorkshire, and no one there would step outside their front door, or even their back door, on a Saturday night - or any other time, for that matter - unless they were dressed to the nines.

It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home.

Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S. families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down.

Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative.

I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

My parents were devoted. Civic minded. We had family counsels. Three of us children against two of them. We lived a 'Leave It to Beaver' time.

I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.

My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time.

My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

I watched a lot of television as a kid, and the suburbs to me - that was exotic! Like, a mom and dad who lived in the same house and had jobs and cooked breakfast at the same time every morning and did laundry in a washing machine and dryer? That was like, 'Woah! Who are they? How do you get to be like that?'

We didn't do cotillions or anything. My family made fun of the pageants.

The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.

I'm a nice middle-class girl.

I was raised in a very Middle Eastern household, and modesty was very important, and dressing to not be desirable or provocative was very important.

When I grew up, I realised what an amazing thing my parents did. It was such a big deal for my mom, a middle class woman, to decide to leave her children and husband to go and do her Ph.D. for three years. And my dad, who is even more middle class, a traditional South Indian, to let his wife do that.

When I was a kid, we called every teacher, every parent - anyone over the age of 20, it seemed - 'Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so.'

Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.

Today, youths say 'Hi and Bye' even to their parents. Instead, they should touch parents' feet as a mark of respect.

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.