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.
What is the most famous quote by J. G. Ballard ?
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
What can you learn from J. G. Ballard (Life Lessons)
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.
The most skyrocket J. G. Ballard quotes that will be huge advantage for your personal development
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various J. G. Ballard inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by J. G. Ballard.
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason.
They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
Sooner or later, all games become serious.
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.
Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
Everything is becoming science fiction.
From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
Surreal quotes by J. G. Ballard
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
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.
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.
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).
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.
An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
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.
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.
Quotations by J. G. Ballard that are dystopian and imaginative.
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.
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?
I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.
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.
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.
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. . .
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.
Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
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.
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
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.
Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
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.
If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.
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.
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.
Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
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.
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.
A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
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!