J. G. Ballard Quotes (20 Quotes)


    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. . .

    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.

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

    Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

    I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.


    I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape. What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.

    A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status --all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremenduous sexual event really a liberation.

    Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

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

    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.

    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.

    The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.

    We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery . . .

    The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy.

    Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.

    The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates --the inhabitants of marketing zones in the consumer goods society, television audiences and news magazine readerships. . . vote with money at the cash counter. . .


    More J. G. Ballard Quotations (Based on Topics)


    World - Cars - Fear - Dreams - Time - Science - Present - Computers & Technology - Future - Reality - Liberty & Freedom - Generation - Sex - Architecture - Reasoning - Politics - Money & Wealth - Design - Madness - View All J. G. Ballard Quotations

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