J.G. Ballard Quotes

#1. Madness--that's all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#2. The only truly alien planet is Earth. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#3. I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on! - Author: J.G. Ballard

#4. Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#5. The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#6. The flies festered over the bodies, in some way aware that the war had ended and determined to hoard every morsel of flesh for the coming famine of the peace. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#7. The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning *everything*. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#8. In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#9. Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game? - Author: J.G. Ballard

#10. E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#11. I often wondered if she was accusing me of starting the war, though in Olga's eyes that would have been the least of my crimes. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#12. By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people's pigeons. I wouldn't recommend it. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#13. Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#14. I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#15. In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#16. The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#17. You're a domestic man, David. You feel hundreds of small affections all the time. They haunt every friendly pillow and comfortable chair like household gods. Together they add up to a great love, big enough to ignore this silly man who's hanging around your wife's skirts. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#18. Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#19. God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#20. Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#21. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#22. I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#23. Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#24. Consciousness is the central nervous system's gamble that it exists ... - Author: J.G. Ballard

#25. Already a sizable traffic jam blocked the Bund. Once again the crush and clutter of Shanghai had engulfed its invaders. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#26. Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the cotton works were my father's responsibility, and duty then counted for something. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#27. Look at the most religious areas of the world at present - the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they're going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#28. One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#29. The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#30. In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside - there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#31. I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know I'm safe. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#32. In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#33. This was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#34. After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#35. The staircase was deserted - the higher up the building the more reluctant were the residents to use the stairs, as if this in some way demeaned them. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#36. Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#37. The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#38. In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#39. What's been happening?"
"Nothing... It's already happened - Author: J.G. Ballard

#40. Mrs Wilder stood passively with her tray, unaware of Royal fondling her, partly because she had been molested by so many men during the past months, but also because the sexual assault itself had ceased to have any meaning. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#41. The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful? - Author: J.G. Ballard

#42. One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#43. I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#44. The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#45. They're listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#46. There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#47. Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#48. The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#49. My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-driven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#50. The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#51. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#52. Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#53. She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#54. A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#55. What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#56. The suburbs dream of violence. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#57. Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#58. The writer's task is to invent the reality. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#59. The car as we know it is on the way out. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#60. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#61. It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#62. After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised - Author: J.G. Ballard

#63. The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam ... - Author: J.G. Ballard

#64. I was terribly wounded by my wife's death. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#65. For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#66. I've never suffered from writer's block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I've always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I'll stop and look for another career. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#67. Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#68. Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms - models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#69. I had a momentary vision of Brooklands' entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#70. Remember, the police are neutral - they hate everybody. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#71. The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#72. So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#73. Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#74. Paranoid eyes with the fusion of passion and duplicity. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#75. She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#76. Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair ... !'
'And in my heart?'
'In your womb I'll set a fly-trap! - Author: J.G. Ballard

#77. Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#78. Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#79. I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he'd had a shower - Author: J.G. Ballard

#80. A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#81. These bizarre images ... reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis's office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#82. People no longer need enemies--in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free... - Author: J.G. Ballard

#83. In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator ... - Author: J.G. Ballard

#84. He turned his back on his mother, but the dead battlefield surrounded him on everyside. Deliberately scuffing his polished shoes, he kicked the cartridge cases at the sleeping soldiers.
I cupped my hands over my ears, trying to catch the sound that would wake them. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#85. People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#86. The Chinese enjoyed the grim spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking that the world was anything else. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#87. People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#88. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#89. Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#90. I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#91. 'Crash' is a metaphor for what I see as the dehumanizing elements that are present in the world in which we live. We're distanced by the nature of the society we inhabit from a normal human reaction. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#92. Almost pedantically, she added: They're not really bombs
they're acoustic provocations. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#93. The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#94. Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#95. In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#96. I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#97. Actually, the suburbs are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one's got to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one's freedom. It needn't be much; kicking the dog will do. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#98. If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can't understand the motive. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#99. Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter. - Author: J.G. Ballard

#100. Everywhere you look Britain, the States, western Europe people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation. - Author: J.G. Ballard