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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. . .
J. G. Ballard
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J. G. Ballard
Age: 78 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 15
Died: 2009
Died: April 19
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Shanghai
China
James Graham Ballard
James Graham J. G. Ballard
Private
Skull
Fashion
Institutional
Century
Skulls
Hell
Gaps
Buchenwald
Affairs
Hells
Bars
Populated
Affair
Inferno
Rate
Dungeons
More quotes by J. G. Ballard
During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.
J. G. Ballard
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
Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
J. G. Ballard
A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
J. G. Ballard
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.
J. G. Ballard
If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
J. G. Ballard
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.
J. G. Ballard
If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.
J. G. Ballard
God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.
J. G. Ballard
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.
J. G. Ballard
Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
J. G. Ballard
The suburbs dream of violence.
J. G. Ballard
The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.
J. G. Ballard
If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can't understand the motive.
J. G. Ballard
Everywhere you look - Britain, the States, western Europe - people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake - a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.
J. G. 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.
J. G. Ballard
But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
J. G. Ballard
I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.
J. G. Ballard
Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
J. G. Ballard
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
J. G. Ballard