J G Ballard bot

I see the future as being abstract, geometric -- the landscape of the moon seems to me to be a good image of the future landscape for earth.

Whereas . . . painters and sculptors are expected to find something new to say, writers are expected to find something old and to go on saying it.

I was present at the birth of my two daughters, who were both born at home . . . Not only was I present when the girls were born but I practically elbowed the midwife aside and delivered them myself.

Our notion of the world as a whole is neutralized.

I got into tremendous danger on a lot of occasions.

They found that everybody had basically the same pattern . . . you had, say, two powerful sexual partners who transcended all the others.

We walk into the toilets in a public building and look in those unkind, revealing mirrors and see ourselves, "God, help!

All that "Mirror, mirror, on the wall."

The middle class . . .police themselves . . .with social codes.

Given this position, one's own personality becomes the yardstick by which one constructs the architecture of any kind of possibility; the word "subjective" no longer has the pejorative overtones it used to have.

The future has turned its back and lost interest in us.

My dream would be to download the entire Harvard University database, or to consult every psychiatric journal ever published.

Jetliners, the colour-coordinated nature trail and the Holiday Inn mean that travel has almost died out and been replaced by tourism.

I'm afraid all the characters are completely made up.

But it's a mistake to ignore them.

This calculated submission of the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigors of time and space, to the formal inquisition of the sciences, psychoanalysis preeminent among them, produces a heightened or alternate reality beyond and above those familiar to either our sight or our senses.

The apparent visual space that we occupy -- that garden, the houses in this street -- does not actually coincide with the optical reality.

Crossing frontiers is my profession.

I always saw myself as merely an observer, tracking various trends and tendencies and trying to uncover the hidden logic that was at work behind the Technicolor surface that so enchants most people.

People here may be middle-class, but they're little more than an indentured coolie force.

Beautiful Shadow by Andrew Wilson is a superb biography of the creator of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley.

Wild sugarcane grew through its wings.

I remember seeing Mad Max 2 in the cinema.

The book caught on there in a big way.

People will still work -- or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives.

All they do is turn money into more money.

The physical mass of the buildings and the discontinuity between street life that existed -- the two dimensions of the plane on the city floor and the hidden, concealed life going halfway up to the sky is very constraining.

Curiously enough, I had very strong visual memories of the camp, but writing about it in detail brought back other memories that I'd completely forgotten: the terrible smell of the place, the heat and terrific humidity in the summer, and the fierce cold in the winter.

The Space Age lasted about ten years.

You get a sense of how genuinely provocative his work is when you see others trying to imitate him -- David Bailey went through a Newton phase and it was utterly pathetic.