J. G. Ballard Quotes - Page 3

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• The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.

  J. G. Ballard

  Moving, Car, Invisible

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• 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

  Book, Blow, Lunch

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• 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

  Sex, People, Bed

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• Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.

  J. G. Ballard

  Magic

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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.

  J. G. Ballard

  Memories, Blood, Desire

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• 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

  Home, School, Reality

  "Sex and wheels: Zadie Smith on JG Ballard's Crash" by Zadie Smith, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2014.

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• 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

  Morning, Three, Afternoon

  "Writers' rooms: JG Ballard" by JG Ballard, www.theguardian.com. March 9, 2007.

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• 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

  Boring, Terrible, Happens

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• Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.

  J. G. Ballard

  Photography, Children, Distance

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• 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

  Self, Regimes, Paranoid

  "A User's Guide to the Millennium". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1996.

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• The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

  J. G. Ballard

  People, Imagination, Fiction

  "Strange fiction". Interview With James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. June 13, 2008.

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Doors, Imagination, Mind

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• All you do is get on and start pedaling . . .

  J. G. Ballard

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• Fiction is a branch of neurology

  J. G. Ballard

  Fiction, Branches, Neurology

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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.

  J. G. Ballard

  America, People, Soul

  October 30, 1982 Interview, Re/Search, No. 8/9, 1984.

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• A visit to Père Lachaise in Paris adds a year to one's life

  J. G. Ballard

  Years, Paris, Add

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• Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Moving, Communication

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• 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

  Fashion, Skulls, Heaven

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• 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

  Self, Rapids, Involvement

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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

  Thinking, People, Boots

  "Age of Unreason". Interview with Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

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• Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

  J. G. Ballard

  Two, Dreamer, Realizing

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard”, p.104, Holt Paperbacks

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• The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.

  J. G. Ballard

  Thinking, Race, Logos

  J. G. Ballard (2006). “Kingdom Come”, HarperCollins UK

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• The car as we know it is on the way out.

  J. G. Ballard

  Car, Way, Remorseless

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• Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.

  J. G. Ballard

  Farewell, White, Forests

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• 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

  Time, Greatest Movie, Events

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