J. G. Ballard

Quotes

• “When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, w...”
• “The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with...”
• “I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitab...”
• “I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothi...”
• “The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams,...”
• “I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of copi...”
• “In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a form...”
• “People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow d...”
• “There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't...”
• “There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral d...”
• “The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures th...”
• “What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most ...”
• “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality...”
• “I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they se...”
• “In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.”