J. G. Ballard
From BillionQuotes
James Graham Ballard (born November 15, 1930 in Shanghai) is a British novelist. Ballard, at eleven years old, lived through the Japanese takeover of China.
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Crash (1973)
- 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.
- After having…been constantly bombarded by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in a real accident.
- After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.
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Attributed
- The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.
- Guardian bio[1]
- Modern technology offers an endless field day to any deviant strains in our personalities.
- I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.
- On the reasons why he wrote Crash
- Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
- Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
- I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
- The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
- The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
- Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
- A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).
- Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.
- Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
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External links
- J. G. Ballard's online fiction at Free Speculative Fiction Online
