J. G. Ballard Quotes

A collection of quotes by J. G. Ballard.

J. G. Ballard, born on November 15, 1930, in Shanghai, China, was a renowned British writer and novelist. Known for his distinct and provocative style, he explored themes of dystopia, modernity, technology, and the human psyche in his works.

Ballard spent his childhood in Shanghai, until the outbreak of World War II, when he and his family were forced into an internment camp by the Japanese. This experience greatly impacted his later writings, as he often drew from his time in the camp. After the war, he moved to England, where he studied medicine and eventually became a doctor. However, his passion for writing led him to pursue a career in literature.

In the 1960s, Ballard gained recognition for his science fiction novels, where he envisioned a postmodern and desolate future. His most famous novel, "Crash," published in 1973, explored the erotic fascination with car crashes and the intersection of technology, sexuality, and violence.

Throughout his career, Ballard published a variety of influential works, including "Concrete Island," "High-Rise," and "Empire of the Sun," which drew inspiration from his own experiences during World War II. His writing often challenged societal norms and brought attention to the dark side of human nature and the impact of technology on our lives.

J. G. Ballard passed away on April 19, 2009, leaving behind a remarkable body of work that continues to captivate readers with its vivid imagination and thought-provoking themes.

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring.

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.

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

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

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination to

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

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I t

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

Humor

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future

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.

Future

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

Future

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a wh

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

War

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing

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.

Language

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.

Sleep

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned

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.

Technology

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

Age

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its

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.

Time

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolu

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?

Violence

I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area aga

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.

Sex

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of

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

Science Fiction

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass m

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 increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

Authors & Writing

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, des

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).

Mistakes

Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. T

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. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

Hell

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highwa

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.

Automobiles

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role

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.

Reality