“I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.”
Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright
Source: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2005), p. 99
“The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit.”
As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard <br class="br">Context: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.<br>These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, t…" by J. G. Ballard?
J. G. Ballard78
British writer 1930–2009Related quotes
“It's the last thing I want to see. It's not a game of the best of three.”
Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker
Interviewed by the Mirror after the EU referendum result http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nigel-farage-says-brexit-referendum-8283500, commenting on the petition to the UK Parliament for a second referendum https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/131215 (25 June 2016) <br class="br">2016
Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
Context: I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity".
The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued:
"I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.
Swami Adbhutananda Disciple
Source: God Lived with Them, p.437
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1963, UN speech
Context: Two years ago I told this body that the United States had proposed, and was willing to sign, a limited test ban treaty. Today that treaty has been signed. It will not put an end to war. It will not remove basic conflicts. It will not secure freedom for all. But it can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: "Give me a place where I can stand — and I shall move the world." My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.
Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author
"Now Wait For This Year", introduction to The Golden Man (anthology, 1980)
Meena Kandasamy (1984) Indian poet
On how she defines herself as a writer in “Meena Kandasamy: ‘If I was going to write my life story, I would condense that marriage to a footnote’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/25/meena-kandasamy-interview-exquisite-cadavers in The Guardian (2019 Nov 25)