JBJ.G. Ballard

80 collected words

J.G. Ballard

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one.

J.G. Ballard / quote

02Undated

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot.

J.G. Ballard / quote

03Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote

04Undated

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

J.G. Ballard / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

J.G. Ballard / quote

08Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote

09Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote

10Undated

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.

J.G. Ballard / quote

11Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote

12Undated

Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.

J.G. Ballard / quote

13Undated

the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.

J.G. Ballard / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

J.G. Ballard / quote

16Undated

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

J.G. Ballard / quote

17Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote

18Undated

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.

J.G. Ballard / quote

19Undated

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.

J.G. Ballard / quote

20Undated

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

J.G. Ballard / quote

21Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote

22Undated

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 / quote

23Undated

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 / quote

24Undated

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

J.G. Ballard / quote