Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they’re somehow discovering reality, but of course that’s just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
Consumerism is so weird. It’s a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You’d think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
I think it’s terribly important to watch TV. I think there’s a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you’re just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that’s going on! J. G. Ballard Read Quote
There’s a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF … No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic. J. G. Ballard Read Quote
