3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard 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.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 J. G. Ballard 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.
