Quotes from J. G. Ballard

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

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.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.

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.

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

I admired anyone who could unsettle people.

Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.

Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze.

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual.

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.

The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.

The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.

They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.

Hollywood flicks are fun, if your idea of a good time is a hamburger and a milk shake. America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood.

Look at the most religious areas of the world at present -- the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they're going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God.

At the sales counter, the human race's greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.

People no longer need enemies--in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free.

Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends.

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movements, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land.

Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.