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Top 100 J.G. Ballard Quotes
#1. Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.
#2. She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
#3. Paranoid eyes with the fusion of passion and duplicity.
#4. Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.
#5. 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.
#6. The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty.
#7. Remember, the police are neutral - they hate everybody.
#8. 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.
#9. 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.
#10. 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.
#11. 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.
#12. For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair.
#13. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.
#14. 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 ...
#15. After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised
#16. 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.
#17. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
#18. The car as we know it is on the way out.
#19. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
#20. 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.
#21. The suburbs dream of violence.
#22. 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.
#23. A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.
#24. 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.
#25. 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.
#26. I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.
#27. 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.
#28. Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
#29. 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.
#30. 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.
#31. I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
#32. 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.
#33. 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.
#34. The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
#35. Almost pedantically, she added: They're not really bombs
they're acoustic provocations.
#36. '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.
#37. I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.
#38. 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!
#39. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
#40. 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.
#41. 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.
#42. 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.
#43. 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.
#44. 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 ...
#45. People no longer need enemies--in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free...
#46. 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.
#47. A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
#48. I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he'd had a shower
#49. Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
#50. 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.
#51. What's been happening?"
"Nothing... It's already happened
#52. Already a sizable traffic jam blocked the Bund. Once again the crush and clutter of Shanghai had engulfed its invaders.
#53. Consciousness is the central nervous system's gamble that it exists ...
#54. 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.
#55. 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.
#56. 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.
#57. 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.
#58. God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.
#59. Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
#60. 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.
#61. 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.
#62. In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
#63. 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.
#64. Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.
#65. 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.
#66. 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.
#67. E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.
#68. Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
#69. 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.
#70. 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*.
#71. 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.
#72. The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.
#73. 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.
#74. 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!
#75. The only truly alien planet is Earth.
#76. 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.
#77. The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.
#78. 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.
#79. The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
#80. Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
#81. 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.
#82. They're listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light.
#83. The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.
#84. 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.
#85. One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.
#86. 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?
#87. 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.
#88. 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.
#89. 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.
#90. 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.
#91. 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.
#92. 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.
#93. After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
#94. This was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.
#95. 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.
#96. 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.
#97. 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.
#98. 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.
#99. One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
#100. 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.
