He picked at the thick rims of dirt under his nails. This decline, both of himself and his surroundings, was almost to be welcomed. In a way he was forcing himself down these steepening gradients, like someone descending into a forbidden valley. The dirt on his hands, his stale clothes and declining hygiene, his fading interest in food and drink, all helped to expose a more real version of himself.

— J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard Quotes

As I sat with her by the airport fence in her darkened car, her white breast in my hand lit by the ascending airliners, the shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers.

— J.G. Ballard

I often wondered if she was accusing me of starting the war, though in Olga’s eyes that would have been the least of my crimes.

— J.G. Ballard

Soon it would be too hot.

— J.G. Ballard

Perhaps space travel is forever doomed because it inevitably recapitulates primitive stages in the growth of our nervous systems, before the development of our sense of balance and upright posture – a forced return to infantile dependency.

— J.G. Ballard

He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The.

— J.G. Ballard

Because we’re not reasonable and rational creatures. Far from it. We resort to reason when it suits us. For most people life is comfortable today, and we have the spare time to be unreasonable if we choose to be. We’re like bored children. We’ve been on holiday for too long, and we’ve been given too many presents. Anyone who’s had children knows that the danger is boredom. Boredom, and a secret pleasure in one’s own malice.

— J.G. Ballard

Wayne laughed shyly. ‘Well, that was Mr. Manson’s decision. He’s very generous. I believe in him, sir,’ he added, making a point of his loyalty. ‘He wants to make America great again.

— J.G. Ballard

Caging the compass, he rotated it towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness became focused on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept ‘South’, with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outwards from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.

— J.G. Ballard

The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head.

— J.G. Ballard

The internal time of the high-rise, like an artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms, generated by a combination of alcohol and insomnia.

— J.G. Ballard

The slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time – in fact, by reversing a clock’s direction and running it backwards one could devise a time-piece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatio-temporal system.

— J.G. Ballard

It’s the most threatening disease of all. It’s called “other people.

— J.G. Ballard

Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.

— J.G. Ballard

In short, their territorial instinct, in its psychological and social senses, had atrophied to the point where they were ripe for exploitation.

— J.G. Ballard

By day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest, and jeweled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.

— J.G. Ballard

Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days.

— J.G. Ballard

Before he’d even uttered a word, Don DeLillo once presented an interviewer with a card that warned: ‘I don’t want to talk about it’; Ballard, in his heyday, could talk for hours, plying his interrogators with Scotch to keep things on an even keel.

— J.G. Ballard

The last reports from Las Vegas described the abandoned gambling capital sitting half-submerged in a lake of rain-lashed water, its wheels stilled, the dying lights of its hotels reflected in the meadows of the drowned desert, a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America.

— J.G. Ballard

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.

— J.G. Ballard

I define inner space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of inner space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

— J.G. Ballard
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