James Graham Ballard Quotes
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
James Graham Ballard
The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
James Graham 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.
James Graham 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.
James Graham 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.
James Graham 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.
James Graham 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.
James Graham Ballard
After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.
James Graham Ballard
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
James Graham 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.
James Graham 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's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
James Graham Ballard
