During the next thirty years the pole-ward migration of populations continued. A few fortified cities defied the rising water-levels and the encroaching jungles, building elaborate sea-walls around their perimeters, but one by one these were breached. Only within the former Arctic and Antarctic Circles was life tolerable. The oblique incidence of the sun’s rays provided a shield against the more powerful radiation. Cities on higher ground in mountainous areas nearer the Equator had been abandoned, despite their cooler temperatures, because of the diminished atmospheric protection.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Weather
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Language, Technology
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Future, The Future
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…
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: America
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).
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Mistakes
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Computers
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Madness
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Artists, The Future, Arts
Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Violence
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.
—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 it is already there.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Reality
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Pornography
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Technology, Socialism
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Science Fiction
I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead—the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!
—J. G. Ballard
Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Dreams, Sleep
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. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
—J. G. Ballard
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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.
—J. G. Ballard
Topics: Time Management, Time
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Margaret Drabble English Novelist
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- George Gissing English Novelist
- D. H. Lawrence English Novelist
- P. G. Wodehouse English Novelist
- Brian Aldiss English Novelist
- Aldous Huxley English Humanist
- Martin Amis British Novelist
- Jane Austen English Novelist
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