Quotes by J.G. Ballard

“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 ul...”

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

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

“First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways its important that first marriages go wrong. Thats how we learn the truth about ourselves.”

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

“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.”

“They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.”

“...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects abou...”

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

“We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us”

“She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear toplessan interesting logic was at work there.”

“Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.”

“Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the pe...”

“the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombi...”

“In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.”

“Sex Technology = the Future.”

“Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in ...”

“I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)”

“Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?”

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogen...”