J. G. Ballard on his Inspiration: The Perverse Desire to Invert and Pursue the Guilty Pleasure

"I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels. But I’m not sure if that’s decadence or simply an attempt to invert and reverse the commonplace, to turn the sock inside out. I’ve always been intrigued by inversions of that kind, or any kind.... 

"The guilty-pleasure notion isn’t to be discounted either, the idea of pursuing an obsession, like the black theme in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours, to a point where it is held together and justified only by aesthetic or notional considerations, beyond any moral restraints. A large part of life takes place in that zone."

-- J.G. Ballard in the Paris Review interview