J. G. Ballard Quotes

109 quotes in 1803 categories

• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
• Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
• I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
• The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as…
• If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by…
• In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
• Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
• I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his…
• A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
• 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 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,…
• 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…

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