110+ J. G. Ballard Quotes On Slavery, Religion And Education

J. G. Ballard was a British author known for his dystopian and post-apocalyptic science fiction. He was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China and moved to England in 1946. His most famous works include the novel Crash and the short story collection The Atrocity Exhibition. Following is our collection on famous quotes by J. G. Ballard on leadership, slavery, religion.

Top 10 J. G. Ballard Quotes

1. A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
2. The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
3. Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
4. Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
5. Sooner or later, all games become serious.
6. Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
7. Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
8. Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
9. In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
10. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

J. G. Ballard Short Quotes

• An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
• Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
• Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
• Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
• A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
• Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
• I admired anyone who could unsettle people.
• If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
• God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.
• Sex times technology equals the future.

J. G. Ballard Quotes About Imaginative.

Actually, the suburbs are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one's got to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one's freedom. It needn't be much; kicking the dog will do. — J. G. Ballard

I've never suffered from writer's block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I've always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I'll stop and look for another career. — J. G. Ballard

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves. — J. G. Ballard

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst. — 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

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. — J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard Quotes About World

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam. — J. G. Ballard

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom! — J. G. Ballard

In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant. — J. G. Ballard

Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War. — J. G. Ballard

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It — J. G. Ballard

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. — J. G. Ballard

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you. — 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

The suburbs dream of violence. — J. G. Ballard

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. — J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard Quotes About Kind

Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's a writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the fork . . . the truth. — J. G. Ballard

Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people. — J. G. Ballard

I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger. — J. G. Ballard

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game? — J. G. Ballard

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

J. G. Ballard Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — J. G. Ballard

I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic. — J. G. Ballard

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). — J. G. Ballard

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology. — J. G. Ballard

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. — J. G. Ballard

Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood. — J. G. Ballard

Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi? — J. G. Ballard

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

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. — J. G. Ballard

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. — J. G. Ballard

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. — J. G. Ballard

Hell is out of fashion --institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. . . — J. G. Ballard

Civilised life, you know, 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. — J. G. Ballard

They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed. — J. G. Ballard

Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement. — J. G. Ballard

There is a British pop group called God. At a recent book signing the lead singer introduced himself and gave me a cassette. I have heard the voice of God. — J. G. Ballard

The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. 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. — J. G. Ballard

Human beings today are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that. — J. G. Ballard

Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place. — J. G. Ballard

A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there'll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far too limited and limiting. — J. G. Ballard

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream. — J. G. Ballard

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there. — J. G. Ballard

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

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. — J. G. Ballard

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy. — J. G. Ballard

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol! — J. G. Ballard

I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide. — J. G. Ballard

One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight. — J. G. Ballard

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not. — 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

All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's no other way. — J. G. Ballard

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

I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation. — 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

Fiction is a branch of neurology — J. G. Ballard

Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave. — J. G. Ballard

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

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. — J. G. Ballard

It seems to me that what most of us have to fear for the future is not that something terrible is going to happen, but rather that nothing is going to happen... I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring. — J. G. Ballard

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

I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts. — J. G. Ballard

The only truly alien planet is Earth. — J. G. Ballard

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing. — J. G. Ballard

Sooner or later, everything turns into television. — J. G. Ballard

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

The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime. — J. G. Ballard

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. — J. G. Ballard

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

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

Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. — J. G. Ballard

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. — J. G. Ballard

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after. — J. G. Ballard

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

Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern. — J. G. Ballard

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

The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause. — J. G. Ballard

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

For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game. — J. G. Ballard

The car as we know it is on the way out. — J. G. Ballard

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant. — J. G. Ballard

Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on. — J. G. Ballard

E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made. — J. G. Ballard

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. — J. G. Ballard

It's true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead. — J. G. Ballard

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

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

People will begin to explore all the sidestreets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually. . . . Sex won't take place in the bed, necessarily--it'll take place in the head! — J. G. Ballard

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror. — J. G. Ballard

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. — J. G. Ballard

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment - we're living inside commercials. — J. G. Ballard

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. — J. G. Ballard

The reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, rekindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it. — J. G. Ballard

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. — J. G. Ballard

Life Lessons by J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard's works often explore themes of alienation, identity, and the effects of technology on the modern world. He encourages readers to think critically about the world around them and to challenge the status quo. Through his works, Ballard teaches us to be open-minded and to question the accepted norms of society.