Top 100 J G Ballard Quotes
#1. The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.
Tacita Dean
#2. Britain has had a very honourable tradition of literary sci-fi - H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock - but for whatever reason, they have never really been given the time of day on screen.
Richard Stanley
#3. I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.
Christopher Fowler
#4. There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See.
Nancy Pearl
#5. I've tended to find that myths of the near future give people the ability to really kind of explore the present, so say for example if look at William Gibson and his book Neuromancer or if you look at J.G. Ballard or Samuel Delaney those are probably three of my favorite writers in that genre.
DJ Spooky
#6. Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Bill Bryson
#7. When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.
Thomas Dolby
#8. I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'
Lev Grossman
#9. I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.
Matt Groening
#10. Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.
J.G. Ballard
#11. Of course, from one point of view the unhappy events of our own century might be regarded as, say, demonstration ballets on the theme 'Hydrocarbon Synthesis' with strong audience participation.
J.G. Ballard
#12. She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
J.G. Ballard
#13. Paranoid eyes with the fusion of passion and duplicity.
J.G. Ballard
#14. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J.G. Ballard
#15. A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J.G. Ballard
#16. Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.
J.G. Ballard
#17. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
J.G. Ballard
#18. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#19. One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set ... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it ... could be dismantled overnight.
J.G. Ballard
#20. The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty.
J.G. Ballard
#21. Remember, the police are neutral - they hate everybody.
J.G. Ballard
#23. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#24. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#25. I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
J.G. Ballard
#26. People will begin to explore all the sidestreets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually ... Sex won't take place in the bed, necessarily
it'll take place in the head!
J.G. Ballard
#27. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#28. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#29. For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair.
J.G. Ballard
#30. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.
J.G. Ballard
#31. I've been in several car accidents, but I can say that they did nothing for my libido.
J.G. Ballard
#32. No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: ... there's a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet. JG Ballard, 2004
J.G. Ballard
#33. 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 ...
J.G. Ballard
#34. The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
J.G. Ballard
#35. After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised
J.G. Ballard
#36. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#37. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
J.G. Ballard
#38. Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J.G. Ballard
#40. But a lottery isn't meaningless. Someone has to win.
J.G. Ballard
#41. Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
J.G. Ballard
#42. Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
J.G. Ballard
#43. Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
J.G. Ballard
#44. The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.
J.G. Ballard
#45. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard
#46. 'What was being on the moon literally like?' [ ... ] 'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. 'It was just like being here.'
J.G. Ballard
#47. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#49. Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.
J.G. Ballard
#50. Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.
J.G. Ballard
#51. I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence.
J.G. Ballard
#52. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#53. Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party.
J.G. Ballard
#54. All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's no other way.
J.G. Ballard
#55. Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.
J.G. Ballard
#56. A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.
J.G. Ballard
#57. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#58. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#59. Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
J.G. Ballard
#60. If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.
J.G. Ballard
#61. A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won't happen.
J.G. Ballard
#62. Reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
J.G. Ballard
#63. I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger.
J.G. Ballard
#64. Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.
J.G. Ballard
#65. I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.
J.G. Ballard
#66. I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.
J.G. Ballard
#67. I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!
J.G. Ballard
#68. Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.
J.G. Ballard
#69. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#70. There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.
J.G. Ballard
#71. Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
J.G. Ballard
#72. This isn't just a shopping mall. It's more like ... "
"A religious experience?"
"Exactly! It's like going to church ...
J.G. Ballard
#73. A reality that is electronic ... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there'll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far too limited and limiting.
J.G. Ballard
#74. Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
J.G. Ballard
#75. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#76. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#77. She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there.
J.G. Ballard
#78. If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
J.G. Ballard
#79. I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
J.G. Ballard
#80. Yes, we gave her drugs - we wanted to free her from those sinister clinics up in the hills, from those men in white coats who know best. Bibi needed to soar over our heads, dreaming her amphetamine dreams, coming off the beach in the evening and leading everyone into the cocaine night.
J.G. Ballard
#81. Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
J.G. Ballard
#82. These days even reality has to look artificial.
J.G. Ballard
#83. There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a stain on the carpet is a personal defilement. There are others, and I think I am one of them, who are entirely indifferent to where they live.
J.G. Ballard
#84. I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.
J.G. Ballard
#85. I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul
J.G. Ballard
#86. My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.
J.G. Ballard
#87. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#88. 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.
J.G. Ballard
#89. The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.
J.G. Ballard
#90. Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.
J.G. Ballard
#91. In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.
J.G. Ballard
#92. Most known motives are so suspect these days that I doubt whether the hidden ones are any better. All the same,
J.G. Ballard
#93. He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The
J.G. Ballard
#94. The run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways
J.G. Ballard
#95. The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
J.G. Ballard
#96. Almost pedantically, she added: They're not really bombs
they're acoustic provocations.
J.G. Ballard
#97. I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
J.G. Ballard
#98. A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.
J.G. Ballard
#99. If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one.
J.G. Ballard
#100. The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life.
J.G. Ballard
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