Ballard, J. G. Quotes

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Ballard, J. G.

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· <blockquote><a href="http://quotationsbook.com/author/424/">Quotes by <em>Ballard, J. G.</em></a></blockquote><br> From <a href="http://quotationsbook.com">Quotations Book</a> ·

James Graham Ballard (born November 15, 1930 in Shanghai) is a British writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film. The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary. · Can we improve this biography? Write us your version

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality."

Ballard, J. G. · Fiction · 0 fans >>
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"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."

Ballard, J. G. · The future · 2 fans >>
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"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."

Ballard, J. G. · Accidents · 2 fans >>
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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..."

Ballard, J. G. · America · 3 fans >>
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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. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave."

Ballard, J. G. · Hell · 0 fans >>
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"Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future."

Ballard, J. G. · Arts and Artists · 0 fans >>
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"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"

Ballard, J. G. · Madness · 7 fans >>
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"I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!"

Ballard, J. G. · Assassination · 0 fans >>
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"The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society."

Ballard, J. G. · Automobiles · 0 fans >>
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"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."

Ballard, J. G. · Automobiles · 0 fans >>
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