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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
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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
Future
Advertising
Newspapers
Portent
Seemed
Portents
Childhood
Shanghai
Mass
Circulation
Cities
Swept
Media
Dominated
Violence
Unpredictable
More quotes by J. G. Ballard
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.
J. G. 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.
J. G. Ballard
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
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J. G. Ballard
Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
J. G. Ballard
Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.
J. G. Ballard
Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.
J. G. Ballard
What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.
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
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. Ballard
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.
J. G. Ballard
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
J. G. Ballard
Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.
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
Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
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
Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
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 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.
J. G. Ballard
Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood.
J. G. Ballard