J G Ballard Quotes

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

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

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves. ~ J.G. Ballard

A visit to Père Lachaise in Paris adds a year to one's life ~ J.G. Ballard

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

The 90's map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will 'sub-contract' many of the functions of the central nervous system. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

Sex x Technology = the Future. ~ J.G. Ballard

'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

At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously copying out something from a novel by Charles Dickens, it was easier if I made it up myself. ~ J.G. Ballard

Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place. ~ J.G. Ballard

Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi? ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy, and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside of our own heads. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing onto his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths. ~ J.G. Ballard

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was. ~ J.G. Ballard

Sex × Technology = the Future. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

The writer's task is to invent the reality. ~ J.G. Ballard

Sooner or later, everything turns into television. ~ J.G. Ballard

When you were twenty, you accepted yourself, flaws and all. Then disenchantment set in. By the time you were thirty your tolerance was wearing thin. You weren't entirely trustworthy, and you knew you were prone to compromise. Already the future was receding, the bright dreams were slipping below the horizon. By now you're a stage set, one push and the whole thing could collapse at your feet. At times you feel like you're living someone else's life, in a strange house you've rented by accident. The 'you' you've become isn't your real self. ~ J.G. Ballard

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave. ~ J.G. Ballard

All the evidence over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and the profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky, against the real needs of their occupants. The psychology of high-rise life had been exposed with damaging results. Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad. A psychotic would have a ball here. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. ~ J.G. Ballard

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos. ~ J.G. Ballard

Beyond our physical touch, the breasts of these screen actresses incite our imaginations to explore and reshape them. The bodies of these extraordinary women form a kit of spare parts, a set of mental mannequins that resemble Bellmer's obscene dolls. As they tease us, so we begin to dismantle them, removing sections of a smile, a leg stance, an enticing cleavage. The parts are interchangeable, like the operations we imagine performing on these untouchable women, as endlessly variable as the colours silkscreened on to the faces of Warhol's Liz and Marilyn. ~ J.G. Ballard

The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I knew that no amount of patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together again. From then on, I was slightly suspicious of all British adults. ~ J.G. Ballard

The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

Just before dawn, when the pain became unbearable, he took one of the morphine tablets and fell off into a loud, booming sleep, in which the great sun expanded until it filled the entire universe, the stars themselves jolted by each of its beats. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.
... And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in God - that's worrying.
... Religions are Trojan horses which conceal profoundly strange psychopathy strains. There's no other explanation for them. The sheer fear of death has been the main engine of religions for a very long time. ~ J.G. Ballard

In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. ~ J.G. Ballard

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant. ~ J.G. Ballard

No American films?'

'I don't like comic strips.'

'Film noir?'

'Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it. Hollywood flicks are fun, if your idea of a good time is a hamburger and a milk shake. America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood. ~ J.G. Ballard

The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic miniarets and baroque domes. On a law of green glass spurs, a child's tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns. ~ J.G. Ballard

... some strangely poetic business about this telephone booth. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. ~ J.G. Ballard

The dealing rooms were a con, and only the river was real. The money was all on tick, a stream of coded voltages sluicing through concealed conduits under the foreign exchange floors. Facing them across the river were two more fakes, the replica of Shakespeare's Globe, and an old power station made over into a middle class disco – Tate Modern. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

The reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, rekindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it. ~ J.G. Ballard

Remember, the police are neutral - they hate everybody. ~ J.G. Ballard

There is a British pop group called God. At a recent book signing the lead singer introduced himself and gave me a cassette. I have heard the voice of God. ~ J.G. Ballard

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly ... Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. ~ J.G. Ballard

But a lottery isn't meaningless. Someone has to win. ~ J.G. Ballard

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones. ~ J.G. Ballard

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels. ~ J.G. Ballard

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. ~ J.G. Ballard

I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas. ~ J.G. Ballard

Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine. ~ J.G. Ballard

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings. ~ J.G. Ballard

He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.
"One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right". ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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

The Internet is an amazing development. ~ J.G. Ballard

Wilder went into his sons' bedroom. Glad to see Wilder, they banged their empty feeding-bowls with their plastic machine-pistols. They were dressed in miniature paratroopers' camouflage suits and tin helmets
the wrong outfit, Wilder reflected, in light of what had been taking place in the high-rise. The correct combat costume was stockbrokers' pin-stripe, briefcase and homburg. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

As I sat with her by the airport fence in her darkened car, her white breast in my hand lit by the ascending airliners, the shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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

Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.
'Not as a rule,' Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: 'Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but I can't take it too seriously.'
Kandinski pulled at a blister on his palm. 'No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously.'
Accepting the rebuke with a smile at himself, Ward pulled out one of the magazines and sat down at a table next to Kandinski. On the cover was a placid suburban setting of snugly eaved houses, yew trees, and children's bicycles. Spreading slowly across the roof-tops was an enormous pulpy nightmare, blocking out the sun behind it and throwing a weird phosphorescent glow over the roofs and lawns. 'You're probably right,' Ward said, showing the cover to Kandinski. 'I'd hate to want to take that seriously.'
("The Venus Hunters") ~ J.G. Ballard

The catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game. [ ... ] Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness. ~ J.G. Ballard

Perhaps space travel is forever doomed because it inevitably recapitulates primitive stages in the growth of our nervous systems, before the development of our sense of balance and upright posture - a forced return to infantile dependency. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres. ~ J.G. Ballard

Remember what we're fighting for."
"I'm trying. Today I helped to kill Angel Porrua. What was he fighting for?"
"Are you serious? We're fighting for what we believe."
"But nobody believes anything! Think about it, Louisa. The Royalists don't want the king, the Nationalists secretly hope for partition, the Republicans want to do a deal with the Crown Prince of Monaco, the Christians are mostly atheists, and the Fundamentalists can't agree on a single fundamental. We're fighting and dying for nothing. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

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

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

Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force. ~ J.G. Ballard

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

The slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time - in fact, by reversing a clock's direction and running it backwards one could devise a time-piece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatio-temporal system. ~ J.G. Ballard

The last reports from Las Vegas described the abandoned gambling capital sitting half-submerged in a lake of rain-lashed water, its wheels stilled, the dying lights of its hotels reflected in the meadows of the drowned desert, a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America. ~ J.G. Ballard

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms. ~ J.G. Ballard

To the Insane: I owe them everything. ~ J.G. Ballard

I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy on the Bund, the city's glamorous waterfront area. ~ J.G. Ballard

The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts. ~ J.G. Ballard

The test of language is how well it can be translated into other tongues, and sex is the most negotiable language of all. ~ J.G. Ballard

Massive cerebral damage and abdominal bleeding in automobile accidents could be imitated within half an hour, aided by the application of suitable coloured resins. Convincing radiation burns required careful preparation, and might involve some three to four hours of makeup. Death, by contrast, was a matter of lying prone. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes. ~ J.G. Ballard