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J. G. Ballard: 156 quotes7 likes

“The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents".”

J. G. Ballard

"Introduction" to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí
Context: The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.

“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

Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

“The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.”

J. G. Ballard

As quoted in J. G. Ballard Quotes : Does The Future Have A Future? (2004) edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan

“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

As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

“The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.”

J. G. Ballard

As quoted in "some ideas for free from time recording" by Emit Records (1995) https://archive.is/20130628060534/www.emit.cc/img/catalog-page9.jpg

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

J. G. Ballard

"Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)

“Some people didn't like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am — trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature — then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it's weird or it's cold.”

J. G. Ballard

The benign catastrophist (2003)

“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”

J. G. Ballard book Running Wild

Running Wild (1988)

“Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.”

J. G. Ballard

"Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century" originally published in Zone (1992)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

“The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.”

J. G. Ballard

"The Consumer Consumed", originally published in Ink (1971)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

“Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.”

J. G. Ballard book Cocaine Nights

"Paula Hamilton"
Cocaine Nights (1996)

“Sooner or later, all games become serious.”

J. G. Ballard book Super-Cannes

"J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes"
Super-Cannes (2000)

“Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War…”

J. G. Ballard

"The Lure of the Madding Crowd", review of The Faber Book of Madness, edited by Roy Porter, originally published in The Independent on Sunday (1991)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

“In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 8

“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”

J. G. Ballard

if there is such a thing
Interview in Penthouse (September 1970)

“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

Interview in Metaphors No. 7, (1983)

“I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.”

J. G. Ballard

Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967), published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones

“People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.”

J. G. Ballard

As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.”

J. G. Ballard

On the reasons why he wrote Crash, as quoted in "From Wales, A World Apart" by Jeff Miers in Buffalo News (7 January 2005); also in "The Body Horrific : Cronenberg Classics at the IFC Center" by David Sharko at Tribeca Film (17 February 2009) http://www.tribecafilm.com/news-features/features/david_cronenberg.html <br class="br">Unsourced variant: "I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror."

“The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 2