Bibliopgraphy of JG Ballard interviews

Interviews with JG Ballard:
An Incomplete Bibliography

Sometime after 1999 David Pringle sat down and made a master list of known JGB interviews. It totalled 138. There's a lot more now. For the past few years Mike Holliday, Simon Sellars and I have been trying to track down as many as we can find. Herewith are the ongoing results of our labours, with those elusive still-to-be-found interviews listed, just in case any of you have a copy and would like to scan them for addition to this bibliography.

1967: George MacBeth
The Third Programme BBC Radio 3 (1967)
George begins: Perhaps the most striking feature to someone reading "You and Me and the Continuum," for example, for the first time, is that it is constructed not in continuous narrative, but in a sequence of short paragraphs, each of which has a heading -- in fact, they're arranged in alphabetical order. But the key point, I think, is that they are broken up. Why did you move on to using this technique of construction? And away we go on a discussion of the "condensed" technique -- three years before The Atrocity Exhibition is published.

1968: Bavarian TV
Ballardian (March 15, 2008)
Munich Round Up, No. 100 (1968), 104-6.
Early in 1968 in Germany, Bavarian TV ran a four-part educational series on science fiction, the third episode of which featured excerpts from an interview with J.G. Ballard. The footage of this episode is no longer available, and is presumably now lost. It seems likely that this 1968 interview is in fact a transcript of the German subtitles used in the TV programme, as the interview here contains no questions. Translated by Dan O'Hara.

1969: Jannick Storm
Speculation [fanzine] No. 21 (February 1969)
This is sort of cool, as it was done early (July, 1968) and published in February 1969. JG is still interested in talking about his "condensed novels" and gives an overview of SF in the 1960s: "I feel that the nineteen sixties represent a marked turning-point. For the first time, with the end of the cold war, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It's a media landscape, if you like. It's almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People's lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction."

1969: Robert Lightfoot & David Pendleton
International Times No. 60 (July 18, 1969)
I do not think that the writer is going to be able to rely so much on the materials of his own imagination. I think that he has got to adapt and take the materials of his fiction from the world around him in the same way as the pop painters have done. The writer’s role is more analytic. He is going to be more of a commentator than an inventor. The writer cannot compete with the world of the media landscapes inventing enormous fictions at a rate of authority and conviction that no writer can match.

1970: Lynn Barber
Penthouse Vol. 5 No. 5 (May 1970)
I guess I learnt enough medicine to cure myself of wanting to be a doctor. That sounds pat but I wanted to be a doctor for neurotic reasons and once I'd got over the neurosis, solved whatever problems I'd had, I found that medicine was a sort of fiction -- all that anatomy and physiology. Gray's Anatomy is the greatest novel of the 20th century. By comparison with our ordinary experience of our bodies, to read Gray's Anatomy is to be presented with what appears to be a fantastic fiction, an epic vastly beyond War and Peace and about as difficult to read. This is serious. Text transcribed by Mike Holliday

1970: Michael McNay
The Guardian (September 11, 1970)
J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930; for the last ten years he has lived with his daughters (he is a widower) in a rundown semi in Shepperton, with books and papers scattered around as though he is on the point of moving out. This rootlessness gives his writing an edge, a quality of observation, a feel for environment that is missing from a lot of even the best of contemporary fiction. He himself does not think of it so much as being rootless as being slightly out of step.

1970: Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton
Friends Magazine No. 17 (October 30, 1970)
I think that the great strength of science fiction is that there is no past -- it's all future and it tallies with the way people look on their lives today. I mean look at most people and you will find that they have declared a moratorium on the past; they are just not interested. One is constantly meeting people who have only a hazy idea of their parents -- who have changed their life-styles since their childhood in every possible way. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Cypher [fanzine] No. 3 (December 1970)

1971: Brendan Hennessey
Times Educational Supplement (January 29, 1971)
I can annex an enormous amount of material into it that I wouldn't be able to in a conventional narrative. Some people seem to be complaining that it isn't a nineteenth-century novel. Why the hell don't they go and live in the nineteenth century? I'm living in 1971.

1971: Brendan Hennessey
Transatlantic Review No. 39 (Spring 1971)
I think SF has quite a kinship with surrealism. The surrealists deal in an external world that has been remade by the mind. They also start from the premise that there's no firm basis of reality anywhere, and I feel this is very close to SF. We're living in a world in which the fictional elements have begun to multiply to an enormous degree, thanks to mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as advertising, and so forth. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1971: Douglas Reed
Books and Bookmen Magazine (April 1971)
I've always been fascinated by the moody images that J G Ballard weaves, using the future as a loom, so I went to worship at the shrine, hoping the idol would not be sporting a clay foot. Someone meeting heroes at first hand is rather like the courtier with the glass slipper. Preconceptions hardly ever fit and Ballard was no exception. His house, instead of Kubla Kahn with visionary vistas rolling to the edge of the mind, was a box among boxes in greater London with the careless peeled appearance of a lizard shedding its skin. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1971: Eduardo Paolozzi, J.G. Ballard, and Frank Whitford
Studio International No. 183 (October 1971)
What follows is an edited version of a conversation between Ballard, Paolozzi and myself conducted in Paolozzi's studio in July of this year. We touched on many subjects, on Surrealism, on violence, on the nature of reality and, especially, on technology as the subject-matter for art of all kinds. Inevitably, much of the conversation otherwise concerned with technology was taken up with discussions about whether or not the tape recorder was working properly. I began by putting it to Ballard that both he and Paolozzi are working within a surrealist tradition, a tradition which, especially in this country, has never been taken very seriously.

1973: Judith Merril
Here's something very special: an early 1970s interview with JGB that's never been published. It was conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show called Ideas, with this specific series featuring science-fiction writers discussing Doomsday scenarios. The program was organized by Judith Merril, and this is a slightly edited version of the raw tape transcript. It's 8,000 words of JGB at his prophetic best, with an interviewer, CBC employee Carol Orr, who wasn't that sympathetic to JGB's more, ahh, interesting ideas. And it's never been published until now.

1973: Jerome Tarshis
Evergreen Review No. 96 (Spring 1973)
Thus speaks Dr. Nathan. And what does Ballard hope for, if man lives to read the end of the Apocalypse currently in progress? "I think the future of this planet can be summed up in one word: sex. I think sex times the computer equals tomorrow. I think the future of sex is limitless.

1973: Peter Linnett
The Writer (June 1973)
How does he work? “Whether I'm writing a novel or a short story, I always write a synopsis. In the case of a short story it'll be about a page long; in the case of a novel about 25 pages. And I try to give it the shape and flavour of the final short story or novel. If I'm satisfied with that, I'll then go ahead and write it. If I'm not satisfied with it, if it doesn't work for me as a story, as the sort of story you would tell somebody sitting next to you in an aircraft, there's something wrong with it. So that's the first stage, and then I write the short story or the novel.” Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1973: Mike Bygrave
Radio Times (December 13, 1973)
"I like it here." He says. "It's a bit like an American suburb - lots of ladies in their early 30s with two kids and a Cortina. The husbands work in the plastics factory, or London Airport or the film studios. It's fluid, classless London."

Galaxie [French] No. 117 (February 1974)

Magazine Litteraire [French] No. 87 (April 1974)

Actuel [French] No. 46 (September 1974)

1975: Philippe R. Hupp
Magazine Littéraire (January 1975)
The following brief interview was printed alongside Griset’s review. Mostly concerned with the novel he was then in the early stages of writing, High-Rise, it does however contain an intriguing reference to Ballard conducting research on the relation between criminal behaviour and the urban environment. Whatever the sources of this research might have been, it seems that it started a line of enquiry which became a central topos of his writing, leading from Concrete Island through High Rise to Running Wild and the loose tetralogy bookended by Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come. Found and translated by Dan O’Hara.

Science Fiction Monthly Vol. 2 No. 10 (October 1975)

1975: Robert Louit
Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction No. 9 (November 1975)
The original english text to the French edition of Crash!, plus an interview with Robert Louit, who translated the novel.

1976: Martin Hayman
Streetlife Magazine Vol. 1, No. 8 (February 7, 1976)
James Ballard is the uncrowned king of science fiction in Britain, an intrepid explorer of inner space and an influence on practically all experimental fiction written in Britain since the early Sixties. Alone among his contemporaries he flashes on landscapes where the reader's imagination has never trodden: gingerly we moved into terrains whose terrible beauty was not governed by the laws of natural science, nor whose events bore any resemblance to the ray-gun toting swashbuckle of cosmic adventure. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

L'Express [French] (February 2-8, 1976)

Vector [fanzine] No. 73/74 (March 1976)

Univers [French] No. 8 (March 1977)

1976: Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
Ballardian (May 23, 2008)
This interview, conducted on March 1, 1976, was first published in German in the science fiction magazine Quarber Merkur, and later re-published in a paperback collection of articles from the magazine in 1979. "I’ve seen my whole task as a writer as to drag SF back into the present, and it seems to me as if in 1965 I found a method of achieving this: to write SF that issues completely from our present. This also seemed necessary to me. You know, the mid-Sixties were marked by events like the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, the space race and the continually increasing importance of science and technology." Translated by Dan O'Hara.

Opus International [French] No. 64 (Autumn 1977)

1979: Dr Chris Evans
Penthouse Vol 14 No. 1 (1979 U.K. Edition)
This one is cool because David Pringle found a page of this interview which was mistakenly left out of the published version, but is included in this posting. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Time Out (November 2, 1979)

1979: Alan Dorey & Joseph Nicholas
Vector Magazine [fanzine] No. 96 (December 1979/January 1980)
The protagonists of most of my fiction feel tremendously isolated, and that seems to exclude the possibility of a warm, fruitful relationship with anybody, let alone anyone as potentially close as a woman... I've got three children, with whom I'm extremely close, and yet I've never introduced a child into any of my stories... It's just that children are not relevant to my work. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Thrust: SF in Review No. 14 (Winter 1979/1980)

1980: Rodney Smith
The Listener Vol. 103 (February 14, 1980)
“It had been too concerned with the future, right from its origins. I wanted a science-fiction of the present day. I am interested in the technology of the present of this world. I am not interested in imaginary alien planets. I am certain you know that the only alien planet is Earth. It is this world that is the strange one. All the extra-terrestrials we need are walking around in these streets.

Aether SF [fanzine] No. 2 (?, 1980)

1981: Alan Burns
The Imagination On Trial, Allison and Busby, London 1981
JGB: Take the novel out of the context of the university Modern Literature Department, push back those plywood partitions and actually see the writer in his professional role, having all the problems (quite apart from the problems of writing) of persuading the publisher to publish what he's done -- writing in the context of whatever one's doing. And that's the beginning of a long, fascinating interview about how and why JGB writes.

Etoile Mecanique [French fanzine] "Numero triple 1, 2 et 3" (July
1981-March 1982)

Sunday Express Magazine No. 38 (December 27, 1981)

1982: David Pringle
Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction No. 24 (February 1982)
The Profession of Science Fiction 26: From Shanghai to Shepperton. This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1982: Toby Goldstein
Heavy Metal Magazine (April 1982)
Everybody's going to be starring in their own porno films as an extension of the Polaroid camera. Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Night Out No. 5 (November 1982)

Metaphores [French, but English text] No. 7 (April? 1983)

1983: Charles Shaar Murray
New Musical Express (October 22, 1983)
External reality in this particular case is a broad comfortable street in Shepperton, not far from the Dream Factory and designed to look like either a set for a suburban sitcom or a deluxe practice track for learner drivers. It seems highly appropriate to find science fiction's darkest, most authentically disturbing dreams welling up here, where Normality is writ so large as to be utterly surreal. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Hard Copy [fanzine] No. 1 (January 1984)

1984: Peter Ronnov-Jessen
Literary Review No. 74 (August 1984)
JGB: It's a misreading to assume that because my work is populated by abandoned hotels, drained swimming pools, empty night clubs, deserted airfields and the like, that I am celebrating the rundown of a previous psychological and social order. I am not. What I am interested in doing is using these materials as the building blocks of a new order. This must have been an odd one, appearing as it did one month before the publication of Empire. Text transcribed by Mike Holliday.

Books and Bookmen No. 348 (September 1984)

1984: Martin Amis
Observer Magazine (September 2, 1984)
"Those were hard times. Don't be deceived by my friend here," he said, patting his belly. "By the end of the war the food had pretty well dried up. The Japs could hardly feed themselves. Why should they bother about an enclave of Allied detainees? Why? These are the realities. We ate cracked wheat, warehouse scrapings, weevils. You'd shift the weevils to the side and eat them last. I often had three rings of them on the edge of my plate."

1984: Colin Greenland
City Limits (September 7, 1984)
“People aren't enobled by suffering. That's another cliché. At the same time, it does strip away a lot of illusions. One pays a terrible price for that, but at least one glimpses some kind of truth.”

1984: Claire Tomalin
The Sunday Times (September 9, 1984)
An investigation into one boy's childhood; a witnessing of a strange slice of history; an astonishing piece of adventure fiction: "Empire of the Sun" is all these things, and certainly the best book that Mr Ballard has yet written.

Time Out (September 27, 1984)

Weekend Australian Magazine (November 3-4, 1984)

1984: W.L. Webb
The Guardian (November 29, 1984)
And here -- just as rooted in reality, just as concretely grounded in history -– is the terrible, fertile source of the visions the seer of Shepperton has [seen] through the past quarter of a century from the sitting-room window of a distinctly low-tech mod. semi, circa 1934, surrounded by the fading bricky charm of Thames Valley metroland.

1984: Thomas Frick
Paris Review, No. 94 (Winter 1984/1985)
In the case of an imaginative writer, especially one like myself with strong affinities to the surrealists, I'm barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves, one generates a set of working mythologies, like tales of gold invented to inspire a crew. I assume one is dealing with a process very close to that of dreams, a set of scenarios devised to make sense of apparently irreconcilable ideas, just as the optical centers of the brain construct a wholly artificial three-dimensional universe through which we can move effectively, so the mind as a whole creates an imaginary world that satisfactorily explains everything, as long as it is constantly updated. So the stream of novels and stories continues...

1985: David Lehman
Newsweek (January 28, 1985)
Stint not on the superlatives: "Empire of the Sun" belongs on anyone's short list of outstanding novels inspired by the second world war. J.G. Ballard's "eyewitness account" of life in a Japanese prison camp somehow combines the exactness of an autobiographical testament with the hallucinatory atmosphere of twilight-zone fiction.

1985: Charles Shaar Murray
Vogue Vol. 142, No. 2 (February 1985)
Ballard published his first short fiction in 1956 and made his debut as a novelist in 1962. His work has at times been so at odds with the science fiction mainstream that it might seem almost a kindness to say that he doesn't really write science fiction. He insists that he does: it is everybody else in the field who doesn't -- not any more, anyway. As space-fantasy and sword-and-sorcery increase their domination of the mainstream, Ballard still hews to his brief, an examination of what lies straight ahead on earth.

Liberation [French] (April 26, 1985)

1985: Tony Cartano and Maxim Jakubowski
Magazine Litteraire [French] No. 219 (May 1985)
Ballard was therefore already riding a wave of critical acclaim in France, and his interviewers here are clearly very well acquainted with his opus, so much so that their use of the adjective — le monde ballardien — slips past almost unnoticed. Their questions, too, are subtle and well-informed. In somewhat elliptically raising the problem of why there are no car-crashes in Empire of the Sun, they reveal a real and very suggestive lacuna in that particular novel: the absence of an entire complex of metaphors for one of Ballard’s most prominent obsessions. His initial reply is ingenious, if not very persuasive. Translated by Dan O'Hara

Le Monde [French] (May 3, 1985)

Le Nouvel Observateur [French] No. 1085 (August 23-29, 1985)

1985: David Pringle
Words: The New Literary Forum, Vol. 1, No. 4 (September 1985)
Psychoanalyst of the Electronic Age. This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1985: Don Watson
New Musical Express (October 26, 1985)
Punk was so interesting -- I still haven't recovered from it. Not knowing anything about the music I saw it as a purely political movement, the powerful political and social resentment of an under-caste who reacted to the values of bourgeois society with pure destructiveness and hate. Bourgeois society offered them the mortgage, they offered back psychosis. Transcribed by Mike Holliday

Les Nouvelles Litteraires [French] No. 7 (June 1986)

Books No. 6 (September 1987)

1987: Lynn Barber
Sunday Express Magazine (September 6, 1987)
For a while, after “Empire of the Sun”, he doubted he could ever write again. He was exhausted by the media attention (“I am quite shy really”) and the process of remembering his own past. “It opened a lot of windows in my mind and exposed all these buried memories that I'd really hidden from myself. Of course, they had surfaced in my fiction for 20 years or more -- the drained swimming pools, the abandoned hotels, they were all memories of Shanghai -- but for the first time I was seeing them undisguised.

Time Out (September 9, 1987)

1987: Nick Kimberley
City Limits (September 10, 1987)
Ballard's fictions have never been "sentimentalizing", but have always found ways to confront the uncomfortable. Empire of the Sun may have brought him the mass audience he deserves; The Day of Creation shows that readers new and old still don't know what to expect from this "disreputable" (his own words) maverick of British fiction.

Panorama [Italian] (September 13, 1987)

1987: Jonathan Cott
Rolling Stone (November 19, 1987)
So if you regard s.f. as the folk literature of the twentieth century, as many people do, its inaccuracies pale into insignificance. In many ways, accuracy is the last refuge of the unimaginative -- it's a last-ditch retreat. Because I think there's something vital about the power of the imagination and its ability to remake the world. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1987: Jim McClellan and Steve Beard
i-D Magazine No. 53 (November 1987)
Surburban life is a big strain, you know. Everybody thinks it's very easy on the blood pressure but that isn't the case. To maintain this fabric of absolute normality requires powerful repressive forces -- all these double glazing and patio doors are sustained by a huge effort of will. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1987: H. J. Kirchhoff
Globe & Mail Newspaper (October17, 1987)
In October of 1987 JG Ballard made his third, and final, trip to Canada -- this time for his first-ever public reading from a novel, The Day of Creation, as part of Toronto's Harbourfront International Festival of Authors. While he was here he did a mini-interview with H.J. Kirchhoff, a writer with Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper. He talks about public speaking, UK literary events, and his writings. "The Day of Creation," he says, "has obviously been affected by the great success of Empire of the Sun, as one would expect."

1987: Chris Peachment
The Times (November 28, 1987)
"Look at Reagan," he says, warming to his hatred of the media grip on our lives. "It is extraordinary enough that an actor can become President, but what is even more worrying is that Americans seem to like it. Supposing that brain surgeons were suddenly replaced by actors pretending to be brain surgeons. No doubt you'd get a terrific bedside manner. But when you are finally in the operating theatre ..." This sounds like an excellent idea for a new J.G. Ballard book. "Yes," he says, "the problem is, it's already been written. It's called Reality."

1987: John H. Richardson
Chicago Tribune (December 21, 1987)
Los Angeles - For many years, J.G. Ballard avoided writing about his horrifying experiences in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. Instead he wrote much-admired science-fiction novels such as "The Drowned World." "I waited 40 years (to write 'Empire of the Sun')," he said. "Maybe I needed to wait that long; it took me 20 years to forget, and 20 years to remember it all again."

1987/88: David Pringle
Interzone No. 22 (Winter 1987/1988)
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

Starlog No. 126 (January 1988)

Sunday Oregonian (January 10, 1988)

1988: Michelle Field
Publishers Weekly (March 11, 1988)
This interview was published in the March, 1988 issue of Publisher's Weekly and was written by London freelance writer Michelle Field. Best part? The boy in The Empire of the Sun, Ballard says with a smile, grows up to be Dr. Mallory, the main character in his new novel, The Day of Creation -- not a science fiction writer in Shepperton. In a way, Ballard says, it is the story of Empire of the Sun turned inside-out: "The circumstances in Empire of the Sun completely enclose the boy and shape him; in The Day of Creation it is Mallory himself who creates the landscapes in the book, and he imposes himself on the landscapes, not the other way around." Fascinating.

1988: Locus Magazine
Locus Magazine Issue 332 Vol. 21 No. 9 (September, 1988)
"But I've wished science fiction could enlarge its scope, its pool of ideas and vocabulary and ambitions. What I regret is the way that in recent years -- maybe I'm showing my age here -- the science fiction of the '50s (much of which would have difficulty getting published these days), that sort of realistic concern for what is going on, is rather out of tune with all the sword and sorcery and futuresque sagas masquerading as science fiction." Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1988: Lindsay Mackie
The Scotsman (March 14, 1988)
"I never wanted to create an atrocity parade," he says now about the book. And though some have claimed that the film is overly sentimental, Ballard says that he did not make the book as violent as the reality was.

1988: Julian Petley
The Guardian (March 17, 1988)
"Even in a two and a half hour film you couldn't include every single element of the novel, but those strands which the film does concentrate on are extremely faithful to the book." He's particularly impressed by Christian Bale's central performance, which he describes as the best by a child in the history of the cinema.

1988: Anthony Denselow
The Sunday Times Magazine (March 20, 1988)
"I was present at the birth of my two daughters, who were both born at home. My son was born in hospital in the days, sadly, when fathers were not allowed to be there. Not only was I present when the girls were born but I practically elbowed the midwife aside and delivered them myself. I remember Fay's head emerging into daylight; it was an extraordinary moment."

1988: Steve Absalom
Daily Mail (March 30, 1988)
He stormed: "I am fed up with this. I can't go on and on explaining that the book, and therefore the film, is semi-autobiographical. Most, and I stress most, of the events I depicted came directly from my own experiences but the film is based on a novel - a novel therefore uses fiction. Why won't they understand this? Let them write their own novels and films."

1988: Impulse Magazine
Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space [Toronto] (Spring 1988)
I assume that it is no accident that human beings have been endowed with prodigious imaginations and a remarkable capacity to enter various hallucinatory or delusional states -- as in dreams, hypnagogic imagery, flashes of deja vu, etc.

1988: ZG Magazine
ZG Magazine (April/May 1988)
I can see a time, probably about midway into the next century, when time will virtually cease to exist. The present will annex both the future and the past into itself. All desires will be fulfilled and people will live in a perpetual present. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1988: Paul Rambali
The Face No. 96 (April 1988)
There's no music in my work," states J. G. Ballard. He smiles, quoting the Futurist manifesto, "The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns."

Women's Wear Daily (April 1, 1988)

1988: Jeannette Kupfermann
You Magazine [supplement to Sunday Mail] (April 10, 1988)
"Women have always been a very powerful force and I much prefer their company to that of men," he said. "They've shaped my life and imagination almost totally, going all the way through to my daughters Fay and Bea. I think all women, whatever their age, are beautiful in some way." He lost his wife in 1964 and has lived in the same house ever since. I asked why he had never remarried.

1988: Paul Gray
Time (April 25, 1988)
"Sadly," Ballard says, "the only surrealists around these days are psychopaths. But we all need to fight off the growing suburbanization of the soul. I want the sane to become surrealists."

Sunday Sport (May 1, 1988)

1988: James Verniere
Twilight Zone Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 1988)
I have my lonely struggle trying to get a broader definition of science fiction: a definition that incorporates Gulliver's Travels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson, on through H.G. Wells, on to that great genius, William Burroughs, who uses huge elements of science fiction in his novels because it's part of the air that we breathe. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

North Beach NOW (Summer 1988)

1989: Julian Dibbell
Spin (January 1989)
The way Ballard calls it, the world is now so fictionalized by advertising and television that the writer's traditional role is pointless. Rather than invent fiction, the writer now has to invent reality. Which is why Ballard has always turned his back on the “realism” of mainstream fiction.

1989: Maxim Jakubowski
The Observer Magazine (April 16, 1989)
Science fiction enjoys a large cult following in this country. Here Maxim Jakubowski asks leading writers of the genre which of their fellow authors they give shelf space to in their libraries.

1989: Richard Kadrey
Science Fiction Eye No. 5 (July 1989)
Angela Carter, the English writer, paid me a nice compliment in a review a few years ago when she said, “Ballard is the last surrealist still in business.” I’m glad she said that.

1990: David Pringle
Fear No. 14 (February 1990)
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1990: Richard Kadrey
Science Fiction Eye No. 6 (February 1990)
"You've got to treat the landscape of television, of advertising, of politics conducted as a branch of advertising, of your friends and the way they furnish their homes, and yourself, as if you're a figment in a dream. That's the classic surrealist approach." Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1990: Luc Sante
New York Times Magazine (September 9, 1990)
Published in 1969, The Atrocity Exhibition was instantly notorious, not even so much for its ''difficulty'' as for political reasons. Its subject was the intersection of sexuality, violence and the mass media, and within this frame occurred several satirical episodes that raised hackles, notably a section entitled ''The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race'' (itself modeled after Alfred Jarry's pre-Dada outrage, ''The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race'').

1990: John Clute
The Sunday Times ["Books" section] (November 11, 1990)
"The stories of 'War Fever' are imaginative fiction, yes, but they confront these topics without any kind of genre baggage, as far as I can see. I don't like to use these terms, but in fact they are realist fiction, in a Zola-esque sense of addressing the realities of the day in a completely frank manner. There is no allegorical machinery in 'War Fever'."

1990: Jeremy Lewis
Mississippi Review Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (1991)
You've got to remember to some extent that the communication/ media landscape sets the agenda: a media landscape dominated by TV that thrives on sensation. This itself has a numbing effect. And whenever there is a major tragedy one sees that these images exhaust their own potential to evoke pity in a very short space of time. With repetition the audience of course becomes bored. The whole thing has a numbing effect.

1991: Christopher Bigsby
Writers In Conversation With Christopher Bigsby, Vol 1, EAS Publishing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 2000. pp 72-86.
Bigsby: But is that what writing has been for you, a means of dealing with experience?
Ballard: I think so. I think, if you are an imaginative writer, your writing becomes much more than the exercise of a social skill. For the imaginative writer, particularly one with a very strong imagination, writing is -- or the exercise of the imagination is -- the way that one’s central nervous system deals with the universe and absorbs and digests experience on every level.

1991: Paul Di Filippo
Science Fiction Eye No. 8 (Winter 1991)
The written word is under threat, and has been for a long time, but is unique in a vital respect: a relationship of unparalleled closeness between reader and writer. Almost everything else -- film, drama, ballet, even painting and sculpture -- are produced by committees.

1991: Antoine de Caunes
Paris TV (February 1991)
French television, Paris (February 16, 1991); produced by Peter Stuart and Pascal Dupont; also shown in an English version entitled "Heroes," Channel 4 TV, London (March 8, 1991). It consisted of short interviews with Ballard and others on the subject of heroism in the modern world, edited for a programme fronted by Antoine de Caunes. Other interviewees included Benazir Bhutto, the Dalai Lama, Anthony Burgess, George Lucas, Bob Geldof, Alan Moore, Sting and Alvin Toffler. Text of Ballard's remarks transcribed by Bernard Sigaud and published in JGB News no. 20 (August 1993)

1991: Blitz Magazine
Blitz No. ? (May 1991)
Generally, I think there will be a retreat by people from the external world, which will be very hazardous for all sorts of reasons, to the interior world of their own homes. The ordinary domestic home of the future will be transformed into something like a television studio. Everybody will have the most advanced video equipment. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: James Delingpole
Weekend Telegraph (July 13, 1991)
I was appalled by the exterior of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. It's the sort of kitsch exhibition architecture that belongs in Disneyland. I suppose we have the Prince of Wales to thank for it.

1991: Uncredited
The Bookseller (August 16, 1991)
"I chose my title to stress the very important role that women have played in my life in giving me, I hope, a positive view of the world and of the future. The world I've written about has on the whole been a violent one - which is what the world is. But most of that violence has been perpetrated by men. There are probably more women in this book than in all my previous books put together - certainly more sympathetic women."

1991: David Pringle
Interzone No. 51/Million No. 5 (September 1991)
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

Waterstone's New Books Winter 1991 (n.d.: Autumn 1991?)

1991: Clare Boylan
The Guardian (September 5, 1991)
Ballard wrote his first creative work when he was 10 and a student at the Cathedral School in Shanghai. "The headmaster was an extremely tyrannical clergyman. He was always giving us lines from improving texts to write. One day I was given 30 pages of "Westward Ho" by Charles Kingsley to copy.

1991: Lynn Barber
Independent on Sunday (Sunday Review) (September 15, 1991)
When I first knew him in the Sixties, he was a familiar, but jolly peculiar, figure on the New Worlds (sci-fi magazine) or Arts Lab scene. He was older than most -- thirtysomething rather than twentysomething -- and rather obviously public-schooly and ex-RAF, whereas the other sci-fi writers were all beard-and-sandals brigade. He drank whisky while everyone else smoked pot, and often turned up with startlingly famous friends, such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi. (Freud did a very good portrait of him.) Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: Andrew Billen
The Observer (September 15, 1991)
"It is often said by readers that I use the same recurrent images," says Ballard, "drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels, crashed cars. Yet I've never thought twice about it. They've just been images that crowded into my mind without any invitation."

1991: Ian Thompson
The Independent (September 21, 1991)
Has The Kindness of Women, with its notable emotional softening, finally exorcised those lifelong obsessions? Submerged forests? Fantasies of desiccated urban technologies? "It's probably exorcised my whole life!", Ballard interposes with a gleeful cackle. "I hope this book will kick-start me into the 1990s with some completely new venture. You never know, I may even start writing light comedy in the manner of Noel Coward". I hope not; James Graham Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene -- and almost certainly the only surrealist in Shepperton.

1991: Paul Pickering
The Sunday Times ["Books" section] (September 22, 1991)
When JG Ballard had his runaway literary success with "Empire of the Sun", he remarked that he couldn't be bothered to gentrify himself. He didn't. Seven years later the suburban house in Shepperton is exactly the same, although the brand new, silver spaceship of a car in the driveway looks as if it has been left by an interstellar joyrider. His latest book, "The Kindness of Women", an equally mesmeric and original sequel to the prize-winning account of a Japanese concentration-camp childhood, is just as disturbing.

Time Out (September 25, 1991)

1991: Steve Beard
i-D Magazine No. 97 (October 1991)
Ballard gazes beyond the open French windows at the scruffy luxuriance of long grass and flat light visible from his sitting room. Does he take a secret pleasure in offending the well-tended sensibilities of his bourgeois neighbours? Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: Stuart Bathgate
Scotland on Sunday (October 6, 1991)
"The 1960s - Swinging England and all that - didn't really get under way until about 1963, the same time as the Beatles," says Ballard. "In fact I date the start of the 1960s from the Kennedy assassination. We were all so outraged that Lee Harvey Oswald could kill this electronic prince."

1991: Stan Nicholls
Blast! (November 1991)
Even the narrator to some extent is fictitious. He's sort of an alternate me. It's very hard to separate the strands of fiction from reality in novels like ‘The Kindness Of Women’ or ‘Empire Of The Sun’; they are interwoven so closely you can't really disentangle them. There's no separation between the narrator and myself as far as that's concerned. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: Elizabeth Dunn
Telegraph Magazine (November 9, 1991)
And here we come to the central paradox of Ballard's life: the privilege of his cushioned world was exchanged for a small room in a prison camp at Lunghua, and imprisonment released his soul. "It was absolutely the reverse of everything that I had ever known. I was part of a huge family of 2,000 people, to whom I had instant and easy access, and I spent all my time making the most of it."

1991: Danny Danziger
The Independent (December 16, 1991)
One doesn't want to sentimentalise these things, but they are part of the fabric of English life and they are admirable. It is sad that these admirable qualities are strait-jacketed into a class system that doesn't really give them full expression. The English cling to that strait-jacket, they are happy wearing it, now and then they pull down one or two zips and breathe a bit more deeply, but they are quite capable of pulling the zips up again.

Fantazia No. 18 (December 1991)

The Washington Post (January 7, 1992)

1992: David Streitfield
International Herald Tribune (January 9, 1992)
"What I don't want to do," says Ballard a bit petulantly, "is go through the whole book saying true, true, false, false, invented, true, true. Why should I?" The volume in question is titled The Kindness of Women. The newly published sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard's novelized account of his imprisonment in a Japanese camp during World War II, "Kindness" is about an English writer named Jim who is born in China, gets interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, lives in Shepperton, becomes a writer, has a wife who dies after stumbling and hitting her head, has these obsessions, etc.

ABC Radio 24 Hours (January 1992)

1992: Rick Slaughter
21.C Magazine [Australian] No. 5 (Autumn [i.e. Spring] 1992)
I don't think it matters at this stage of the game. I mean, I'm 60 years old, so the bulk of my work lies behind me on any reckoning. I have to have some kind of closing of accounts in my life as a writer, and it would have been dangerous, I think as you implied, to savor it in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women 20 years ago. But at my present age, I don't think it makes any difference. In fact, it might be a liberating move. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1992: Lindsay Fulcher
The Lady (May 26-June 1, 1992)
Where do you most like to live -- town or country?
I prefer where I live now, in suburbia, which is neither. It is where the most exciting things go on today, the biggest changes in lifestyle and consumer taste. Here in Shepperton, public imagination flourishes and the waves of the future break.

Urania [Italian] No. 1191 (November 1992)

The Hardcore [fanzine] No. 8 (no date; December 1992?)

1993: Pat Quigley
Albedo One [fanzine, Dublin] (No 2, Autumn 1993)
Autobiographies tend to be written from the perspective of maturity with the benefit of hindsight, by people who are able to weigh their lives on some sort of moral scales, and chart the overall direction of their lives in retrospect. I didn't want to do that, because I wasn't sure what my life would weigh in any sense of scales and also, by writing a work of fiction you can dramatise the immediate present with the maximum emotional force and engage the sympathies of the reader.

1994: No Author Given
The Independent Magazine (January 29, 1994)
This interviews is from a series titled "Where did you get that?" This time JGB discusses his Delvaux paintings.

1994: Frances Welch
The Sunday Telegraph ["Review" section] (March 20, 1994)
The idea of an approaching death poses no threat to his atheism. "The self I now occupy will be obliterated. It's a daunting prospect, but not daunting enough for me to create a trapdoor through which I can swing to safety."

1994: Andrew Billen
The Guardian (August 7, 1994)
Perhaps the best thing about visiting JG Ballard is getting a chance to marvel at his house, a peeling semi-detached in Shepperton with a yellow front door blistered from the 30 summers he has lived there. It makes no concessions to celebrity, fashion, cleanliness, the money he made out of the film of Empire Of The Sun or, indeed, anything else. It is utterly true to its owner, who, at 63, is not only the same age as it but judging by his gappy, stained grin is wearing about as well.

1994: Will Self
The Evening Standard (September 8, 1994)
JG Ballard rolls the phrases around in his mouth as if they were ironic boiled sweets. 'Since I've always been interested -- keenly interested -- in the next five minutes, where we are and what happens next, it's helped to have a sort of distance. Because a lot of English fiction is too rooted. The writers are too comfortable one feels... um, they're like people returning again and again to the same restaurant... um, they're comfortable with the flavours on offer and the dishes on offer.'

1995: Lukas Barr
KGB Magazine (1995)
People believe in nothing. There’s nothing to believe in now. All ideology is gone. The great churches are empty, political ideology is finished, there’s just a scramble for power. There’s this vacuum… what people have most longed for, which is the consumer society, has come to pass.

1995: Nicholas Zurbrugg
World Art Magazine [Newark, New Jersey] (January 1995)
English writers, of course, don't break out. They're trapped by their childhood. And I think that most English fiction of the 20th century has suffered grievously from the nature of English life. I mean, one has to be frank. Most of the English writers who have achieved anything this century have tended -- if they were born here -- to have gone abroad at a very early age. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1995: Andrew Asch
Sci-Fi Universe (April 1995)
Ballard still holds views that are far beyond the pale of many people. “I think that there should be more pornography around,” says Ballard. “It might even be necessary to make it compulsory, but not the criminal end of it.” Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1995: Marcus Moure
Spike Magazine (November 1995)
Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts among his influences the surrealist painters Dali, Magritte, and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom he considers to be one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.

Newsday ["Fanfare" section] (May 21, 1995)

Probable Cause: A Literary Revue [Miami] (Summer 1995)

1995: Unidentified
The Sunday Express (August 20, 1995)
[Q] What do you remember most about VJ Day?
[JGB] The sudden disappearance of the Japanese guards from the civilian prison camp at Lunghua, near Shanghai, and the silent skies empty of American bombers.

Les Inrockuptibles [sic: French magazine] (November 15, 1995)

Magazine Litteraire [French] no. 338 (December 1995)

1996: Gillian Ferguson
Scotland on Sunday ["Spectrum" section] (January 7, 1996)
"The English middle-classes are trapped too as they find themselves sitting at one end of the lifeboat around the captain who holds the tiller in one hand and a large revolver in the other, but at the other end of the lifeboat are the shivering third class passengers who are not sure whether the captain knows where he's sailing the lifeboat but daren't move forwards."

1996: Pat Kane
The Scotsman Magazine (January 9, 1996)
The imaginative world of Ballard -- where nude old men videotape their own deaths; where forensic doctors organise their own atrocity exhibitions; where black is white, and evil is transparent -- sits so strangely with this clubbable Cambridge grandad, ensconced in his cosy semi, passing out whisky and sodas.

1996: David Pringle
SFX No. 9 (February 1996)
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1996: David Pringle
Interzone No. 106 (April 1996)
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1996: John Harlow
Sunday Times (May 12, 1996)
Ballard's views will intensify the debate over screen violence. The move to “suppress” Crash follows controversies including the release on video of Natural Born Killers, which has been suspended, and Kids, which depicts under-age sex and has been refused distribution by the Warner chain of cinemas in Britain.

1996: Jonathan Romney
The Guardian (May 20, 1996)
"The film's all about dealing with mortality. I always do this in my films, it's a rehearsal for my own death to see what my characters do with theirs. They've eroticised death, and that's their triumph. It's a good trick to pull off if you can do it."

1996: Mick Brown
Telegraph Magazine (September 14, 1996)
In 1969 [sic] the author J. G. Ballard staged an exhibition at the Arts Lab in London on the theme of “crashed cars”. The exhibition consisted simply of three cars, towed from the wrecker's yard and placed under spotlights; no text, no accompanying photographs, no explanations. “I wanted to confirm my suspicions,” Ballard says, “that there was something about the car crash that had never been looked at before.” The effect, he says, was electrifying.

1996: Chris Rodley
The following ‘Guardian Lecture’ took place on 10 November 1996 at the British Film Institute, London. The first U.K. screening of Crash had taken place the previous evening as part of the London Film Festival. The introduction and initial questions were provided by Chris Rodley. Unfortunately a number of the questions from the audience are inaudible on the recording. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1996: George Petros
Within the fact packed pages of his speculative fiction, James Graham Ballard killed more people and caused more damage than anyone. His dystopian dramas employ catastrophe as a catalyst for the evolution of characters. Ultimately, his victims adapt, learning to groove with it, whatever it may be -- however deadly, however devious. Other writers have obliterated most of the human race, but silver linings exist around their dark clouds of destruction - otherwise, from what vantage point would they write? Ballard doesn't have that problem -- he's out of the picture. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1996: Damien Love
Ballardian (October 12, 2007)
And, you know, we’re in a culture of substitutes — Elizabeth Hurley. They had Marilyn Monroe, we’ve got Elizabeth Hurley. Something’s gone wrong. Is it that we’re engineering a new kind of life for ourselves that has echoes of those that I describe in this book?

1996: John Hughes
Unpublished
What someone like Barbara Rafferty, and this is true in real life, they keep needing to up the anti, to raise the stakes. The extreme hypothesis is never satisfying itself. They’ve always got to go one step further; otherwise they’re terrified of sinking into banality and the mundane. Barbara Rafferty is constantly upping the stakes, constantly testing herself and everyone around her to the limit. Now, this is the whole point. There is no agenda strictly speaking.

1997: Ralph Rugoff
frieze Magazine
Well, I think the unconscious collisions between the primary psychic drives are now transferred into the world of consumer design. The car, of course, has to embody contradictions between safety and fashion. Its interior has to be a cosy extension of the home, whereas all those blinking red lights and gauges signal danger. You don’t have to look very far to understand its appeal.

1997: James Call
Kulture Deluxe Magazine
I noticed that famous people who died in car crashes, their deaths had a resonance that wasn't present in the case of famous people who died in, say, plane crashes or hotel fires, or whatever. The car did lend a certain sort of drama and mystery. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1997: Andrew Hultrans
Artforum Magazine Vol. XXXV, No. 7 (March 1997)
What “Crash” does -- it's particularly noticeable in the film -- is remove the moral framework that reassures the spectator that these horrific scenes are, in fact, constrained within some system of moral value. And I think that unsettles people, because they ask questions -- I mean, “Do the filmmaker and the writer really believe that auto wrecks are erotically stimulating?” Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1997: Tom Shone
The New Yorker (March 17, 1997)
Lunch with Ballard is a distinctly nerve-racking affair. He is a model of good-humored geniality, but his volume level when he is broaching such topics as the possible eroticism of car-crash wounds takes no heed whatsoever of surrounding diners. Next to us, a family of four make increasingly unenthusiastic progress through their Sunday roast; instead, they're huddling over it in whispered conference: Who on earth is this man? The answer is simple: like it or not, they’ve been seated beside Britain's only living prose surrealist.

1997: Chris Rodley
Dazed & Confused Magazine (June, 1997)
In the case of Crash of course the phenomenon is the role of the car crash in the imagination of the 1990s. There's no doubt that for some reason the car crash occupies a huge place in the public imagination, particularly among filmgoers and television viewers and to some extent among readers of novels, where to some extent it's almost impossible to see a film these days without a car crash. Now why? What is it about the car crash that so touches some vital part of human experience?

1997: Richard Kadrey and Suzanne Stefanac
Salon Magazine (September 7, 1997)
William Burroughs' raw-boned figure haunted us long before his death. For nearly half a century, he infected our literature, seeding it with his obsessions, suspicions and passions. In his brutal honesty, we began to learn something new about truth and humor and maybe even love. Of the many authors who have acknowledged his influence, few have been as unflinching or provocative as J.G. Ballard. From the chromey auto-eroticism of Crash to the surrendered innocence of Empire of the Sun, Ballard has refined a style that cuts through the moralism and sentimentality that blunt so much contemporary writing. After Burroughs' death, Ballard spoke to us by phone from his home in Shepperton, England.

1997: Simon Sellars
Ballardian (October 7, 2005)
This transcript was first published in Sub Dee Magazine No. 5 (Summer, 1997) by Simon Sellars. In 1997 Ballard undertook a series of readings and Q&A sessions around London. This is a combined transcript of two of these sessions, which were ostensibly to promote Cocaine Nights. The sessions took place at the Royal Festival Hall, London (chaired by writer Kevin Jackson) and at Books, Etc., Charing Cross.

1997: Chris Hall
Spike Magazine (November, 1997)
One week before David Cronenberg's Crash opened in the UK at the beginning of June, the normally reclusive author J.G. Ballard appeared at a regional press conference and pre-screening of the film in Wardour Street, London. Cronenberg's film is based on Ballard's 1973 novel of the same title, and the controversy surrounding Crash has brought Ballard back into the public eye to defend a film which he sees as a hauntingly accurate depiction of the book he wrote nearly a quarter century ago.

1998: Uncredited
Sunday Times (February 1, 1998)
[Q] With which character do you most identify?
[JGB] Meursault in Camus's Outsider. A boring afternoon, a beach and a gun.

1998: Jason Cowley
Prospect Issue 33 (August/September 1998)
I found this very interesting 1998 article/interview on the website of one Jason Cowley, a journalist, cultural critic and editor in the UK. He is an editor and writer on the Observer, contributing editor of the New Statesman, and is soon to become the new editor of Granta. JG is his usual erudite self: "Yet surely the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own."

1998: Jean-Paul Coillard
Disturb Ezine (1998)
You said once that your first short story, "Escapement", was, except for the fantasy aspect, a good description of your first year of wedding; can we find the same thing that you lived, adapted for two brothers in Cocaine Nights? In other terms, was Cocaine Nights a way to describe or transcend your feelings about yourself and your brother?

1998: David Gale
BBC Radio 3 (November 10, 1998)
J.G. Ballard writes about the collisions between people and a world transformed by technology. In the 1970s he wrote the novel Crash, recently filmed by David Cronenberg, in which his protagonists derived erotic satisfaction from car crashes. Other works, such as The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise and most recently Cocaine Nights, explore a territory in which the self is splintered and invaded by a myth-ridden mediascape that has eclipsed the real world.

1998: Zinovy Zinik
"All this leaves the human race extremely vulnerable to any master-manipulator. I've remarked elsewhere that messiahs usually emerge from deserts, and I expect the next Adolf Hitler or Mao to emerge from the wilderness of the vast North American and European shopping malls. The first credit card Buddha, at its best, or, at its worst, the first credit card Stalin."

1999: Uncredited
Sunday Times Magazine (March 7, 1999)
"The reason I didn't continue as a doctor was that I wanted to be a writer; I had so much to write about. My time in the dissecting room has given me an enormous fund of images and ideas and metaphors that I've fed into my fiction. Some people have criticised me for being a bit too clinical about the human body. But I think one consequence of spending two years dissecting it is that you have no illusions about it."

1999: William Feaver
The Art Newspaper (July 1, 1999)
To a packed auditorium, the internationally renowned novelist J.G. Ballard talked with William Feaver about the artists and works of art that had had a significant impact on him.

2000: Chris Hall
Spike Magazine (November 1, 2000)
"The main theme of Super-Cannes," he says, "is that in order to keep us happy and spending more as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of course what's been happening for a while. If you look at the way in which the more violent contact sports are marketed - American Football, wrestling, boxing - and of course the most violent entertainment culture of all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices of appetites flowing. That is the risk."

2001: Richard Coles
Night Waves BBC Radio 3 (October 30, 2001)
JGB: I think there's something about the intensity of the short story, it's very obsessive in the way it tackles whatever the situation may be — a single theme usually, and comparatively few characters who don't need to be developed. You can take a single mood and focus on it, almost in the way the scientist focuses on something down through the lens of a microscope. I think that fits into my particular temperament, which is a mix of, sort of, the obsessive and roving imagination.

2001: Sebastian Shakespeare
The Literary Review, (2001)
Shakespeare: How did you dream up the ideas of sonic statues, psychotropic houses and singing flowers? Did you derive any of your conceits from hallucinogens?
Ballard: Pure imagination, the most potent hallucinogen of all.
Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

2002: James Naughtie
BBC Radio 4 (February 3, 2002)
I think the character of Jim is fairly true to, you know, the boy that I was. The whole point of the book, really, is that — he's learning to love the war. Because the war represents security, and that's a, sort of, nightmare truth about war. And however unpleasant things are, people get used to it, and they begin to rely on it — even people in prison camps, people under enormous physical and mental pressure. You know, it's the Stockholm syndrome in a kind of way, you begin to love your captors because they represent security. I think there's a strong element of that in Jim's character. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

2002: Harriett Gilbert
Meridian Masterpiece BBC World Service, (February 14, 2002)
I'm never happier than when writing about drained swimming pools. There's something about them that touches a deep nerve. It may derive from my wartime experiences, as the Europeans abandoned their houses in Shanghai the swimming pools began to drain, and many were emptied during the war. I used to go round these empty houses after the war, and really there is a certain sort of melancholy beauty about these huge, empty pools. There's something about a drained swimming pool that suggests the end of an epoch, the end of a season. I think I thought of water really as a medium of, you know, of transformation. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

2003: Chloe Diski
The Observer (January 19, 2003)
One should love outside one's own head. I believe that the tongue is just as important as other organs. If you have an appetite for food, you'll have an appetite for sex. I'm always suspicious of people who lack an appetite and I admire people with strong appetites. However, now I'm 72 I don't eat a great deal and,l et's say, my tastes have simplified. It is a matter of metabolism, and I'm bored. I've eaten everything.

2003: Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Beck's Futures 2003 Art Exhibition Catalogue London (2003)
"I think that my imagination was fully formed from the beginning, though that is probably true for most painters, novelists, poets and so on. I've always believed in the radical imagination that sets out to change reality - probably a doomed ambition. I wasn't interested in accepting the social consensus. I wanted to unsettle and unnerve, to provoke the reader. I never consciously shaped my ideas or my style. I simply followed my obsessions, and was confident that they would take me to strange destinations beyond the edge of the map."

2003: David Wilson
The South China Post (September 21, 2003)
Ballard says he felt safe sharing a tiny room in the camp with his parents, who had run a cotton business. He "ran wild and had a wonderful time". Only as an adult did he appreciate the threat. "I look back now and think: God, the things that went on there."

2003: Susie Mackenzie
The Guardian (Saturday September 6, 2003)
The benign catastrophist. When JG Ballard moved to his house in Shepperton in 1960, it was a rural idyll, "The spirit of Stanley Spencer's nearby Cookham seemed to preside over the splash meadows." Now, Shepperton has caught up with him, he says; its present has come to resemble his own imagination. A forest of TV aerials block out the poplars and church spires. Multistorey car parks have risen "like the megaliths of a future Stonehenge". The M3 has arrived. The whole place is, he has said, like a suburb of London airport. And much better for it, in his view.

2003: Philip Dodd
Night Waves BBC Radio 3, (October 2003)
JGB: Ten or 15 years ago I went to Chelsea Harbour, which is a much more upmarket, purpose-built enclave of luxury flats and townhouses, and looking around it I remember thinking this is a stage set. The whole thing was engineered on the drawing board, including, I suspect, a sort of psychology of the place — and if it's a stage set the fact remains that the scenery could be moved at a moment's notice. Looking around one can imagine something going wrong here. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

2003: Mariella Frostrup
Book Club BBC Radio 4 (October, 2003)
I've been at it now for a long time — whatever it is, 40 years — and people have always accused me of being very humourless as a writer, and I've genuinely been surprised by that. I mean, I think there's a great deal of humour in Millennium People — some of it's pretty deadpan. I'd like to just say that I never poke fun at the middle-classes, I take them seriously, and I take their complaints seriously — but of course there is something inherently comic about the idea of a middle-class revolution. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

2003: Zulfikar Abbany
The Age (November 1, 2003)
'It's pretty difficult to get peoples' backs up these days. We're so... anesthetised." He may laugh, but it's a serious consideration for the 73-year-old British author, J.G. (James Graham) Ballard. Since his entry into the world of fiction, particularly science-fiction, in the late 1950s, Ballard has got plenty of backs up.

2004: Italian TV Video Interview
In January of 2004 an Italian book publisher sent a crew to JGB's Shepperton home, and for 25 minutes The Man discussed his books, his art, and his observations about society. It's great, and JGB really gets into it. The files are Real Player.

2004: Jeanette Baxter
The Guardian (June 22, 2004)
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. When Markham (not JGB) uses the phrase "upholstered apocalypse" he reveals that he knows what is really going on in Chelsea Marina. That is why he is drawn to Gould, who offers a desperate escape.

2004: Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford
Ballardian (August 15, 2008)
This interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. The original date of the interview was March, 2004. "The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock."

2004: Chris Hall
Spike Magazine (November 1, 2004)
Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes – to examine what might happen when all we have left as an ideology is consumerism. "People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be," he says witheringly. "All we've got left is our own psychopathology. It's the only freedom we have – that's a dangerous state of affairs."

2005: V. Vale
Arthur Magazine (February 15, 2005)
From his home in Shepperton, J.G. Ballard wonders over the phone with V.Vale of RE/Search if there is something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality. This interview was excerpted from J.G. Ballard Interviews. It and sister volume J.G. Ballard Quotations are now available from Re/Search Publications at www.researchpubs.com Chuckle along as JGB toasts George Dubya.

2005: Evelyn Finger
Ballardian (June 24, 2008)
This interview appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit in September 2005. Translated by Dan O'Hara.

2006: Mark Goodall
Ballardian (August 12, 2008)
A short interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens, published by Headpress. "But the audiences were fully aware that they were collaborating with the films, and this explains why they weren’t upset when what seemed to be faked sequences (they might have been real in fact) started to appear in the later films — there was almost the sense that they needed to appear ‘faked’ to underline the audience’s awareness of what was going on — both on screen and inside their own heads."

2006: Toby Litt
tobylitt.com (July 10, 2006)
Because consumerism makes inherent demands, it has inherent needs, which can only be satisfied by pressing the accelerator down a little harder, moving a little faster, upping all the antes, and this could, you know… In order to keep spending and keep believing, we need to move into the area of the psychopathic. That's the fear.

2006: Marianne Brace
The Independent Arts & Book Review (15 September 2006)
According to Ballard, however, "Life is filled with surrealist moments, if we only saw them... Human beings," he adds, "are the only members of the animal kingdom whose normal state of mind is pretty close to madness." As a boy, he witnessed much violence. He became distrustful of conventional reality. "I realised that what we think of as conventional reality -- this quiet suburban street, for instance -- is just a stage set that can be swept away."

2006: Robert McCrum
Ballardian (September 20, 2006)
JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age to shame, Ballard talked about his childhood and influences before touching on some of the big questions of our age: consumerism, Islamic terrorism and the communications revolution. Taped and transcribed by Ben Austwick.

2006: Simon Sellars
Ballardian (September 29, 2006)
And so we have Richard Pearson — this advertising man, who’s been trying to liven up the advertising business with a bit of psychopathology and has failed — arriving at this huge shopping mall and seeing a chance to put his theories into practice. He finds David Cruise, a third-rate Fuhrer running a cable-TV show and gets to work, not realising quite what he’s doing.

2007: Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak
Ballardian (May 17, 2008)
Originally published in German as, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007). "I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear." Translated by Dan O'Hara.

2007: Alexander Gutzmer
Ballardian (December 7, 2007)
This is an English translation of an interview with J.G. Ballard by Alexander Gutzmer, originally published in German by Welt am Sonntag, June 3, 2007. Translated by John Carter Wood.

2008: Philip Dodd
Ballardian (February 7, 2008)
From the Nightwaves program on Radio 3. The interviewer, Philip Dodd, engages JGB in such a way that a different spin is applied to the familiar elements from Ballard’s life. But he’s also wise enough to avoid the ‘Ballardian cliches’ that we know so well from Empire of the Sun, instead focusing on the really interesting strata of the autobiography where new and revealing information can be found. Transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

2008: James Campbell
The Guardian (June 14, 2008)
Visitors to JG Ballard's semi-detached domain in Shepperton, beyond the far reaches of suburban west London, experience a sense of stepping through the looking glass. As a writer, Ballard is the ultimate urbanist, the master blender of technology and desire. In his front room, seated at a large oak table that supports a typewriter, he rhapsodises "the motorway, this road with no light that says STOP, the view through the windshield, the cross-patterns of chromium and glass that beckon you towards a better world..."