English novelist (1930-2009)
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
Crash
The white façades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Religions emerged too early in human evolution — they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
J.G. BALLARD
Drive, Autumn 1971
As Neil approached the camp the women's laughter still sounded from their tents. The noise had sent the peccaries stamping around their wire pen and set off a sympathetic screeching of cockatoos and lorikeets. All the creatures on Saint-Esprit, even those destined for the dining table, were celebrating the new addition to the sanctuary family.
J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise
Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Remember, the police are neutral -- they hate everybody.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
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 behavior, drained of emotion and anger.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Either the world is at fault, or we’re looking for meaning in the wrong places.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
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 boot. 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
A User's Guide to the Millennium
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a hemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan's body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot. Soon enough, one of the Americans would be shot down into Lunghua Camp. Jim tried to decide which of the ruined buildings would best conceal his body. Carefully eked out, the kit and equipment could be bartered with Basie for extra sweet potatoes for months to come, and even perhaps a warm coat for the winter. There would be sweet potatoes for Dr. Ransome, whom Jim was determined to keep alive. He rocked on his heels and listened to an old woman crying in the nearby ward. Through the window was the pagoda at Lunghua Airfield. Already the flak tower appeared in a new light. For another hour Jim stood in line with the missionary widows, watched by the sentry. Dr. Ransome and Dr. Bowen had set off with Sergeant Nagata to the commandant's office, perhaps to be interrogated. The guards moved around the silent camp with their roster boards, carrying out repeated roll-calls. The war was about to end and yet the Japanese were obsessed with knowing exactly how many prisoners they held. Jim closed his eyes to calm his mind, but the sentry barked at him, suspecting that Jim was about to play some private game of which Sergeant Nagata would disapprove.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
Trying to distract Jane, I talked far too much. During the few months of our marriage I had told my doctor-bride almost nothing about myself, and the drive became a mobile autobiography that unwound my earlier life along with the kilometres of dust, insects and sun.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
I think now of the other crashes we visualized, absurd deaths of the wounded, maimed and distraught. I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents carried out with venom and self-disgust, vicious multiple collisions contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers. I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one-way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
I had a momentary vision of Brooklands' entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash