J.G. Ballard quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from J.G. Ballard on Wise Famous Quotes.

Sooner or later, all games become serious.

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

This was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

I've been in several car accidents, but I can say that they did nothing for my libido.

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

A terrorist bomb not only killed its victims, but forced a violent rift through time and space, and ruptured the logic that held the world together.

People no longer need enemies--in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free...

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city.

In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

This isn't just a shopping mall. It's more like ... "
"A religious experience?"
"Exactly! It's like going to church ...

The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.

Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.

In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I admired anyone who could unsettle people.

The look of a man who had made the devil's bargain and knew he had lost.

Almost pedantically, she added: They're not really bombs
they're acoustic provocations.

The Internet is an amazing development.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

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.

Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War ...

Each man is an island unto itself" - Strangman

Remember, the police are neutral - they hate everybody.

Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

To the Insane: I owe them everything.

A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.

The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

From sandwich to summer school, they were the symbols of subservience and the enemies of freedom.

Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.

As I left, promising to mention her to my father, Olga said: Now you can play hide-and-seek in the whole
world.

The world was beginning to flower into wounds.

Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.

The city was a vast and stationary carousel, forever boarded by millions of would-be passengers who took their seats, waited and then dismounted.

They're listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light.

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

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.

Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity.

The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty.

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised

One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.

Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse ...

I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is 'boring.' The future is going to be boring.

Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.

When Armageddon takes place, parking is going to be a major problem.

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.

Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he'd had a shower

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.

Not for the first time Laing reflected that he and his neighbors were eager for trouble as the most effective means of enlarging their sex lives.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

Fiction is a branch of neurology

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

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.

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.

Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.

He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.

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!

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

The suburbs dream of violence.

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.

A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.

Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.

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.

E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.

For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair.

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?

Sex x Technology = the Future.

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.

Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.

Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protestors.

The only truly alien planet is Earth.

Paranoid eyes with the fusion of passion and duplicity.

The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.

Already a sizable traffic jam blocked the Bund. Once again the crush and clutter of Shanghai had engulfed its invaders.

Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.

God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.

I am looking into a silent world.

These days even reality has to look artificial.

One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is alright.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic

Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.

Nothing is real until you put it in the VCR.

The writer's task is to invent the reality.

Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.

It had not occurred to me that sexual games could be played with an unborn child.