J G Ballard bot

As a result of, many younger writers and filmmakers are now simply expressing their own obsessions; that is all that is left that they feel they can say something truthful about.

The American Army?

What's so sad about most people's lives, my own included, is that they accept the roles that are given them.

Very few in the case of Surrealism, but not many more in the case of Science Fiction.

My mother tipsily climbed the miniature stairs, listening to my father declaim the postman's naive verses in his resonant baritone.

More and more of what used to be regarded as aberrant or perverse activity is now accepted as more or less conventional behaviour.

I wish I'd had more dogs.

People who ought to know better are absolutely refusing to acknowledge the immense hold that violence exerts over people.

I conceive of certain possibilities and extend them through an act of imagination.

Bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet.

You tell yourself these tales of gold to sustain yourself, to inspire this one-man team.

Dark Star is the Catch-22 of outer space.

Lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel.

During the night the swimming-pool had drained itself.

Schools of architecture and design like Art Deco and the Modernist movement were engines running forward into the future.

An institutionalized paranoia seems a bleak future for the human race.

People will soon be living only in the present and will not be interested in the future at all.

It's a good thing he established his reputation in the late 1960s when people were still prepared to make a bit of an effort . . . I think critical judgments were sharper then.

He describes the fate of the isolated man who is surrounded by a vast and impenetrable bureaucracy, and begins to accept himself on the terms the bureaucracy imposes.

Before the Iraq War, my feeling was one of great anxiety.

I think there's something about the automobile crash that taps all kinds of barely recognized impulses in people's minds and imaginations.

The media landscape had sealed a Technicolor umbrella around the planet, and then redefined reality as itself.

And, of course, many of my characters are wilting under the pressure; they don't want to buy any more refrigerators or electric toothbrushes . . . They want to find some truth about themselves.

I suppose there just hasn't been room for political statements in my fiction.

Strange little obsessions become huge lava flows and threaten to smother common sense.

But they call it entertainment.

A remarkable percentage of Science Fiction stories and novels in those days were concerned with the here and now.

Francis Bacon is, for me, the greatest British painter of the last century, unflinching in the way he returned the Gorgon's stare.

I suppose World War II was the last fling, but since then aviation is just Skytrain, which lacks any sort of imaginative dimension whatever.

In a real sense, my novels write me.