J. G. Ballard Quotes
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Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
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In wartime Shanghai I saw so many horrors … Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is, we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
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The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.
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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.
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Dalí went on shocking the bourgeoisie till the end. The others, Ernst, Magritte, were all accepted into the critical fold as serious painters. Only Dalí held out till the end. He just didn't give a damn.
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Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
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Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.
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I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.
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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.
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'Crash' is a metaphor for what I see as the dehumanizing elements that are present in the world in which we live. We're distanced by the nature of the society we inhabit from a normal human reaction.
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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.
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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 the will to enforce significant change.
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Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
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Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.
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In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.
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Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
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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).
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I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
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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.
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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.
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My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women.
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In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
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Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?
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I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.