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If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.

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
Smell
Everything
Right
Garlic

More quotes by J. G. Ballard

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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
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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
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Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
J. G. Ballard
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Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
J. G. Ballard
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A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
J. G. Ballard
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Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
J. G. Ballard
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Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
J. G. Ballard
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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
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Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
J. G. Ballard
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A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J. G. Ballard
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Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
J. G. Ballard
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Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
J. G. Ballard
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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.
J. G. Ballard
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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
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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
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Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
J. G. Ballard
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When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
J. G. Ballard
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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
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Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. Ballard
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The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.
J. G. Ballard