J.G. Ballard On Writing

The author of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition writes:

“The novels of Stephen King are much closer to what you would call ‘general fiction’ than the novels of someone like Virginia Woolf. Literary fiction tends to hark back to a golden age when the great modernist writers dominated the first half of the 20th century, but those days have passed. I assume that King thinks he is a completely serious writer. It may be that the future of the novel lies in more popular areas, and that the so-called ’serious’ novel will sink into something like the role poetry has today.”

(Observer, 9/17/2000)

“Hitler … the epitome of the half-educated man … (A child) of the reference library and the self-improvement manual, of mass newspapers creating a new vocabulary of violence and sensation, Hitler was the half-educated psychopath inheriting the lavish communications systems of the twentieth century. Forty years after his first abruptive seizure of power he was followed by another unhappy misfit, Lee Harvey Oswald, in whose historic Diary we see the same attempt by the half-educated to grapple with the information overflow that threatened to drown him.”

(New Worlds, 1969)