J. G. Ballard Quotes - Page 4

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• Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

  J. G. Ballard

  Decadence, Burial, Customs

  J. G. Ballard (2001). “The complete short stories”, Fourth Estate

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• 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

  Sex, People, Bed

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• People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.

  J. G. Ballard

  Italian, Technology, Cities

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• 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

  Strong, Block, Careers

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• 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.

  J. G. Ballard

  Writing, Successful, Soul

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Two, Dreamer, Realizing

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard”, p.104, Holt Paperbacks

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• 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*.

  J. G. Ballard

  Powerful, Imagination, Saws

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

  J. G. Ballard

  War, World, Firsts

  "The Lure of the Madding Crowd". The Independent on Sunday, 1991.

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "Age of unreason". Interview With Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

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• 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

  Book, Voice, Groups

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• 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

  Believe, Reality, Hands

  Munich Round Up Interview, 1968.

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Faces, Mask, Bites

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• 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.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Sleep, Men

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard”, p.246, Holt Paperbacks

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• 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.

  J. G. Ballard

  Space, Events, Obsession

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• '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

  Tired, Moon, Car

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• The suburbs dream of violence.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, America, World

  J. G. Ballard (2006). “Kingdom Come”, HarperCollins UK

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• 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

  Memories, Taken, Animal

  J. G. Ballard (1965). “The Drowned World and the Wind From Nowhere”

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• Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

  J. G. Ballard

  Writing, Reality, Doe

  "Inner Landscape". Interview with Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton, www.jgballard.ca. October 30, 1970.

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• 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

  Mind, Landscape, Feels

  Conversation with George MacBeth, BBC3, February 01, 1967.

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• 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

  Games, Space, Imagination

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• 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

  Rain, Bats, Giants

  J. G. Ballard (1965). “The Drowned World and the Wind From Nowhere”

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• The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom.

  J. G. Ballard

  Ideas, Car, Machines

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Honesty, Modern, Mark

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• 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.

  J. G. Ballard

  Stars, Energy, Orbit

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• 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

  Death, Children, Car

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