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J. G. Ballard

76 quotes

“Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967)], published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones
“I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967), published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones
“I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in ‘Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Munich Round Up, 100 (1968), with translation by Dan O’Hara
“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; written 1967 - 1969, annotated 1990)
“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 (1930–2009) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Penthouse (September 1970)
“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 (1930–2009) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)
“A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true … Everybody's going to be starring in their own porno films as extensions of the polaroid camera. 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, like "Rite of Spring" in Disney's Fantasia … our internal devils may destroy and renew us through the technological overload we've invoked.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Heavy Metal (April 1982)
“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 (1930–2009) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
“Everywhere — all over Africa and South America … you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul … This is the prison this planet is being turned into.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
“A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: News from the Sun" in Myths of the Near Future (1982)
“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 (1930–2009) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Metaphors No. 7, (1983)
“The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Running Wild (1988)
“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Running Wild (1988)
“Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty" interview by Jean-Paul Coillard in Disturb ezine (1998)
“For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty" interview by Jean-Paul Coillard in Disturb ezine (1998)
“For me the intentions of background music are openly political, and an example of how political power is constantly shifting from the ballot box into areas where the voter has nowhere to mark his ballot paper. The most important political choices in the future will probably never be consciously exercised. I'm intrigued by the way some background music is surprisingly aggressive, especially that played on consumer complaint phone lines and banks, airplanes and phone companies themselves, with strident non-rhythmic and arms-length sequences that are definitely not user-friendly.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza
“I began to become an adult when I was 24 and got married and had children. That matures you, but I wouldn't say I was fully an adult until I was in my forties. The trouble with the whole adult debate is that if you're asking 18-year-olds to go out and fight wars for you then you can't deny them adult rights even though in sorts of other ways they wouldn't qualify until they were about 25. These days adolescence stretches much further into adulthood than it used to. There's no longer any encouragement to be mature.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza
“The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "some ideas for free from time recording" by Emit Records (1995)
“The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in J. G. Ballard Quotes : Does The Future Have A Future? (2004) edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan
“People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)
“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)
“Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase — everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood...”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)
“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the reasons why he wrote Crash, as quoted in "From Wales, A World Apart" by Jeff Miers in Buffalo News (7 January 2005); also in "The Body Horrific : Cronenberg Classics at the IFC Center" by David Sharko at Tribeca …
“Science fiction: The body's dream of becoming a machine. Robotics: The moral degradation of the machine. Typewriter: It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free space of the imagination.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century", reprinted in Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 (The MIT Press, 2023).
“In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous auto disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We had entered an enormous traffic jam ... The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science and technology multiple 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 (1930–2009) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
“At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.'”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it ... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key that would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking the world was anything else.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings today … are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City [London's Wall Street], the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kafka in the Present Day", originally published in [London] Sunday Times (1983)
“The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Magnetic Sleep", review of From Mesmer to Freud by Adam Crabtree, originally published in [London] Daily Telegraph (1994)
“Perhaps our own fin-de-siècle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Back to the Heady Future", review of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, originally published in the [London] Daily Telegraph (1993)
“The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling booth. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Consumer Consumed", originally published in Ink (1971)
“Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century" originally published in Zone (1992)
“Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...”
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Lure of the Madding Crowd", review of The Faber Book of Madness, edited by Roy Porter, originally published in The Independent on Sunday (1991)