J.G. Ballard Quotes

I can't travel without Sudoku.

I have always maintained that if a program is to be successful, it must... be voluntary... based on need and must not be financed through a payroll tax.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

It may not always be easy, convenient or politically correct to stand for truth and right, but it is the right thing to do. Always.

The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.

First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.

We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us

In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)

Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?

Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.

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.

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

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.

A postcard and I'm pining for New England. . .

...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.

In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.

So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.

He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.

He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs."One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".

If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one.

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

Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.

Almost pedantically, she added: "They're not really bombs-- they're acoustic provocations.

this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.

the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be.

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?