J.G. Ballard Quotes

this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.
J.G. Ballard
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
the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.
J.G. Ballard
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
Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
J.G. Ballard
Almost pedantically, she added: "They're not really bombs-- they're acoustic provocations.
J.G. Ballard
Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
J.G. Ballard
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
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 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
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
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
If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one.
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
Recently she had become intrigued by the admiring glances of other women. The admiration of her own sex existed on a higher and more intense plane than anything men could offer, like the romantic rivalries of sisters. Together, women formed a conspiracy of glances entirely exchanged behind the backs of their menfolk.
J.G. Ballard
No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet." JG Ballard, 2004
J.G. Ballard
He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.
J.G. Ballard
So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.
J.G. Ballard
In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
J.G. Ballard
Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.
J.G. Ballard
...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
J.G. Ballard
The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life.
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
She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
J.G. Ballard
The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
J.G. Ballard
Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.
J.G. Ballard
Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.
J.G. Ballard
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
J.G. Ballard
Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.
J.G. Ballard
Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.
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
These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
J.G. Ballard
Tourism is the great soporific. It's a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there's something interesting in their lives. It's musical chairs in reverse..... All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. The tourists smile at their tans and their shiny teeth and think they're happy. But the suntans hide who they really are-- salary slaves, with heads full of American rubbish. Travel is the last fantasy the 2oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
J.G. Ballard
As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room.
J.G. Ballard
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
J.G. Ballard
Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?
J.G. Ballard
I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)
J.G. Ballard
the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways
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
We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us
J.G. Ballard
The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.
J.G. Ballard
They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.
J.G. Ballard
Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair...!''And in my heart?''In your womb I'll set a fly-trap!
J.G. Ballard
Sex × Technology = the Future.
J.G. Ballard
Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques.
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
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
...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
J.G. Ballard
First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.
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 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
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
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
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J.G. Ballard
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
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J.G. Ballard
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
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
First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.
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