FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

Will you read my manuscripts?

No. Writing my own manuscripts is hard enough. But if you are a serious writer your books will find their way into the world and I look forward to reading them.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Ideas come from the past, the present and glimpses of the future. At the moment I am thinking about two foxes I saw walking side by side on the edge of a motorway in Spain at mid-night. I don't really know why this memory preoccupies me but it is an image that has frozen in my mind and which I know I will thaw on paper one day. So writing is the way I can explain something mysterious to myself - I write to find out out what it is I know, or want to know. I guess the appeal of the foxes to me are something to do with companionship in a bleak desert landscape - their slow pace, the heat, their fur and bone - in contrast to the chrome, steel and speed of the cars whizzing past them. I don't know how this will translate when I eventually use it.

It's difficult to find your books. Some of them are out of print.

Oh GOD, tell me about it. Having one's books out of print is a bit like dying. But the back list will spring back to life. Billy and Girl (Bloomsbury) is also published in the USA by Dalkey Archives. You can order it through Amazon. The Unloved, Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography can be tracked down... I hope you find them and that it was worth the effort.

I want to adapt your novels for the theatre. Actually I just want to use three or four pages. Do you mind? Who do I find out about rights from etc.

No I don't mind. I want you to use my work in all kinds of medium, forms, technologies. I want the ideas and atmospheres I spin into the world to be meaningful to you and add something to your own thinking. And I want your work to add something to my thinking. But you must get permission first. There are too many pirate productions of both my plays and extracts from my novels- not to mention my poetry book AN AMOROUS DISCOURSE IN THE SUBURBS OF HELL. Apparently the latter is often read at weddings! A close friend told me she was at a wedding party recently and the bride's speech was mostly from my angel in the AMOROUS DISCOURSE. Darling, I wish you well and hope BIG LOVE is yours for ever. Apart from weddings and funerals,everything else must go through my agent Katie Haines. E-mail her here...

What are you reading at the moment?

Everything by the totally brilliant Edmund White. Most recently, Arts and Letters (Cleis Press) and My Lives (Bloomsbury). Also, my favourite book published in 2005 was WEIGHT by Jeanette Winterson (Canongate). This is stunning writing-in parts it made me cry, others it made me guffaw at her audacity, at all times it is driven by a uniquely fierce intelligence. I have come to think the only important thing a writer can do is ask interesting questions, as Winterson always does. Nothing else matters very much.
 
With this in mind, all of J.G Ballard's books should become part of your life.

Do you like reading from your books?

Nearly always.

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