J.G. Ballard Quotes

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.

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

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.

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.

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

She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there.

Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.

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.

Sex × Technology = the Future.

Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair...!'
'And in my heart?'
'In your womb I'll set a fly-trap!

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

...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

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

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.

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.

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

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