JG Ballard quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by JG Ballard

Top JG Ballard Quotes

Browse top 93 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by JG Ballard.

Favorite JG Ballard Quotes

1. "I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)" ~ J.G. Ballard

2. "Strangman shrugged theatrically. "It might," he repeated with great emphasis. "Let's admit that. It makes it more interesting—particularly for Kerans. 'Did I or did I not try to kill myself?' One of the few existential absolutes, far more significant than 'To be or not to be?', which merely underlines the uncertainty of the suicide, rather than the eternal ambivalence of his victim." He smiled down patronisingly at Kerans as the latter sat quietly in his chair, sipping at the drink Beatrice had brought him. "Kerans, I envy you the task of finding out—if you can." ~ J.G. Ballard

3. "However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot." ~ J.G. Ballard

4. "Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair...!''And in my heart?''In your womb I'll set a fly-trap!" ~ J.G. Ballard

5. "The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way." ~ J.G. Ballard

6. "Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance." ~ J.G. Ballard

7. "Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all." ~ J.G. Ballard

8. "The ambiguous role of the car crash needs no elaboration—apart from our own deaths, the car crash is probably the most dramatic event in our lives, and in many cases the two will coincide. Aside from the fact that we generally own or are at the controls of the crashing vehicle, the car crash differs from other disasters in that it involves the most powerfully advertised commercial product of this century, an iconic entity that combines the elements of speed, power, dream and freedom within a highly stylized format that defuses any fears we may have of the inherent dangers of these violent and unstable machines." ~ J.G. Ballard

9. "I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic" ~ J.G. Ballard

10. "A visit to Père Lachaise in Paris adds a year to one's life" ~ J.G. Ballard

11. "Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic." ~ J.G. Ballard

12. "In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . ." ~ J.G. Ballard

13. "I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. 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

14. "At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as pedophilia and sodomy will become derided cliches, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls." ~ J.G. Ballard

15. "One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops." ~ J.G. Ballard

16. "The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit." ~ J.G. Ballard

17. "It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland." ~ J.G. Ballard

18. "Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant." ~ J.G. Ballard

19. "The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life." ~ J.G. Ballard

20. "A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup." ~ J.G. Ballard

21. "Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes." ~ J.G. Ballard

22. "First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage." ~ J.G. Ballard

23. "She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there." ~ J.G. Ballard

24. "We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us" ~ J.G. Ballard

25. "If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one." ~ J.G. Ballard

26. "The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible." ~ J.G. Ballard

27. "Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms - models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth." ~ J.G. Ballard

28. "After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised" ~ J.G. Ballard

29. "Mrs Wilder stood passively with her tray, unaware of Royal fondling her, partly because she had been molested by so many men during the past months, but also because the sexual assault itself had ceased to have any meaning." ~ J.G. Ballard

30. "After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man's face emerged like a sleeping child's above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow." ~ J.G. Ballard

31. "Each man is an island unto itself" - Strangman" ~ J.G. Ballard

32. "Massive cerebral damage and abdominal bleeding in automobile accidents could be imitated within half an hour, aided by the application of suitable coloured resins. Convincing radiation burns required careful preparation, and might involve some three to four hours of makeup. Death, by contrast, was a matter of lying prone." ~ J.G. Ballard

33. "...I had a momentary vision of Brooklands' entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets." ~ J.G. Ballard

34. "...parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need." ~ J.G. Ballard

35. "Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode." ~ J.G. Ballard

36. "Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy." ~ J.G. Ballard

37. "The only truly alien planet is Earth." ~ J.G. Ballard

38. "Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques." ~ J.G. Ballard

39. "Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out." ~ J.G. Ballard

40. "In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside - there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions." ~ J.G. Ballard

41. "Yes, we gave her drugs - we wanted to free her from those sinister clinics up in the hills, from those men in white coats who know best. Bibi needed to soar over our heads, dreaming her amphetamine dreams, coming off the beach in the evening and leading everyone into the cocaine night." ~ J.G. Ballard

42. "The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?" ~ J.G. Ballard

43. "Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains' were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70'; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone's guess." ~ J.G. Ballard

44. "Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture." ~ J.G. Ballard

45. "I've been in several car accidents, but I can say that they did nothing for my libido." ~ J.G. Ballard

46. "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." ~ J.G. Ballard

47. "All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war." ~ J.G. Ballard

48. "Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence." ~ J.G. Ballard

49. "The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts." ~ J.G. Ballard

50. "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. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct." ~ J.G. Ballard

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