J. G. Ballard Quotes

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in whi...

We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more...

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)

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

Sex × Technology = the Future.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in...

The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of t...

Recently she had become intrigued by the admiring glances of other women. The admiration of her own ...

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, ...

The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives ...

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only ap...

He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.

...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian s...

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

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief....And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in...

Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or event...

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance th...

A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame a...

Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral...

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free o...

Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact...

They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the to...

Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.

Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above ...

Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it ...

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back t...

In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into...

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

He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs."On...

the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying the...

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - t...

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of th...

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

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

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

Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.

First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages ...

In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to ho...

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

Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.'Not as a rule,' Ward ...

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find...

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the b...

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in the...

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything...

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after P...

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strang...

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baude...

In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at ...

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. Wh...

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early r...

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rai...

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to...

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in c...

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual ...

There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact t...

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprun...

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent worl...

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

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and acc...

These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the...

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

The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer t...

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks w...

Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I e...

So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.

Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?

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

Tourism is the great soporific. It's a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea th...

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devi...

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.