J. G. Ballard quotes

J. G. Ballard was a British novelist, short story writer, and essayist, widely recognized for his dystopian and provocative visions of the future. His works often explore the effects of technology, society, and environmental change on human psychology. He became especially famous for novels such as "Crash" and "Empire of the Sun," which cemented his legacy as a major figure in modern literature. Here are 127 of his quotes:

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

J. G. Ballard

Science and technology multiple 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

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

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

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

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 booth. 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

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.

J. G. Ballard

Sooner or later, all games become serious.

J. G. Ballard

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

The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.

J. G. Ballard

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

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

Psychiatrists - the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...

J. G. Ballard

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

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

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

J. G. Ballard

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

J. G. Ballard

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

J. G. Ballard

Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.

J. G. Ballard

Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.

J. G. Ballard

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

J. G. Ballard

God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.

J. G. Ballard