J.G. Ballard Quotes

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief....And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in God - that's worrying....Religions are Trojan horses which conceal profoundly strange psychopathy strains. There's no other explanation for them. The sheer fear of death has been the main engine of religions for a very long time.

Sex × Technology = the Future.

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.

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet." JG Ballard, 2004

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot.

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.