J. G. Ballard

Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even…

— J. G. Ballard

Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's…

— J. G. Ballard

My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a…

— J. G. Ballard

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense.…

— 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…

— J. G. Ballard

Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly…

— J. G. Ballard

It's true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a…

— J. G. Ballard

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think…

— J. G. Ballard

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

— J. G. Ballard

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration…

— J. G. Ballard

Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change…

— J. G. Ballard

A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.

— J. G. Ballard

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.

— J. G. Ballard

“Nothing is real until you put it in the VCR.”

— J. G. Ballard

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably…

— J. G. Ballard

I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car…

— J. G. Ballard

All you do is get on and start pedaling . . .

— J. G. Ballard

I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the…

— J. G. Ballard

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment,…

— J. G. Ballard

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

— J. G. Ballard

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because…

— J. G. Ballard

I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.'…

— J. G. Ballard

For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at…

— J. G. Ballard

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all…

— J. G. Ballard

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and…

— J. G. Ballard