J. G. Ballard Quotes - Page 6

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• Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.

  J. G. Ballard

  Loneliness, Space, Perspective

  J. G. Ballard (1962). “Memories of the space age”, Arkham House Pub

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• 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

  War, Legs, Gestures

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• 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

  Rain, Reality, Thinking

  J. G. Ballard (2005). “Conversations”, Re/Search Publications

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• 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

  Loyalty, Hate, Shopping

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

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• It's true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.

  J. G. Ballard

  Powerful, Lying, Writing

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• The functional freedom that anybody can buy a gun and go out and murder a lot of people at a McDonald's is prevalent, yes. But through the effects of TV and interactive video systems and so forth, we'll also have the freedom to pretend to be a mass murderer for the evening. I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer controlledthe 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

  Drama, Gun, Reality

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• 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

  Running, Dream, America

  Metaphors, No. 7, 1983.

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• 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

  War, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Bombs

  "The End of My War". Sunday Times, 1995.

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• 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

  Hands, Killing Others, Play

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• Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.

  J. G. Ballard

  Technology, Men, Keys

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• I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, Thinking, Innovation

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

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• 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

  Believe, Ideas, Vocabulary

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• A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status - all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).

  J. G. Ballard

  Drama, Car, Desire

  Penthouse magazine Interview, September 1970.

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• 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

  Exercise, Reality, Imagination

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Past, World, Residents

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “Running Wild”, p.62, Macmillan

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• During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

  J. G. Ballard

  Media, Cities, Childhood

  "Look back at Empire" by JG Ballard, www.theguardian.com. March 3, 2006.

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• I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

  J. G. Ballard

  Order, Optimism, Political

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

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• I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

  J. G. Ballard

  Writing, World, Want

  "Strange fiction". Interview With James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. June 13, 2008.

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• 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. . .

  J. G. Ballard

  Fashion, Skulls, Dungeons

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