Top 90 J. G. Ballard Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.”

— J. G. Ballard

2. “In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.”

— J. G. Ballard

3. “Fiction is a branch of neurology.”

— J. G. Ballard

4. “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

5. “Sex times technology equals the future.”

— J. G. Ballard

6. “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

7. “The suburbs dream of violence.”

— J. G. Ballard

8. “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.”

— J. G. Ballard

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

— J. G. Ballard

10. “Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.”

— J. G. Ballard

11. “The only truly alien planet is Earth.”

— J. G. Ballard

12. “I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.”

— J. G. Ballard

13. “Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.”

— J. G. Ballard

14. “My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.”

— J. G. Ballard

15. “I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.”

— J. G. Ballard

16. “Sooner or later, everything turns into television.”

— J. G. Ballard

17. “Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.”

— J. G. Ballard

18. “Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.”

— J. G. Ballard

19. “Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.”

— J. G. Ballard

20. “Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.”

— J. G. Ballard

21. “I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.”

— J. G. Ballard

22. “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

23. “All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day – even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re professional. There’s no other way.”

— J. G. Ballard

24. “Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.”

— J. G. Ballard

25. “A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.”

— J. G. Ballard

26. “I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger.”

— J. G. Ballard

27. “The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.”

— J. G. Ballard

28. “The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”

— J. G. Ballard

29. “The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.”

— J. G. Ballard

30. “A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”

— J. G. Ballard

31. “If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.”

— J. G. Ballard

32. “The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.”

— J. G. Ballard

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it’s we women who control magic.”

— J. G. Ballard

37. “An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.”

— J. G. Ballard

38. “Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.”

— J. G. Ballard

39. “Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.”

— J. G. Ballard

40. “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

41. “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

42. “Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.”

— J. G. Ballard

43. “The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.”

— J. G. Ballard

44. “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.”

— J. G. Ballard

45. “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

46. “Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don’t you realize that those two species are extinct now?”

— J. G. Ballard

47. “I admired anyone who could unsettle people.”

— J. G. Ballard

48. “Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I’m intensely interested in change – probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?”

— J. G. Ballard

49. “Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.”

— J. G. Ballard

50. “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