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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 -
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.
J. G. Ballard
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The Internet is an amazing development.
J. G. Ballard -
The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.
J. G. Ballard -
Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past - no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.
J. G. Ballard -
I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.
J. G. Ballard -
God was a clever idea … The human race came up with a winner there.
J. G. Ballard -
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
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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 -
There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a stain on the carpet is a personal defilement. There are others, and I think I am one of them, who are entirely indifferent to where they live.
J. G. Ballard -
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 -
I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on!
J. G. Ballard -
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 -
I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence.
J. G. Ballard
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Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. Ballard -
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 -
Some people didn't like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am - trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature - then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it's weird or it's cold.
J. G. Ballard -
It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.
J. G. Ballard -
The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning *everything*.
J. G. Ballard -
The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
J. G. Ballard
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'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. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.'
J. G. Ballard -
The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself.
J. G. Ballard -
So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun.
J. G. Ballard -
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