English novelist (1930-2009)
The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
Was there a Gulf War? Already the question seems less absurd than it would have done a week ago, despite the destruction rained from the air and the huge number of casualties on the Iraqi side. After the arcade video-game of the bombing campaign, the "100 hours" of ground fighting, filtered through the military and TV censors, were scarcely enough to root the reality of the war in our minds. Push-button death is a game with few risks, at least to the television viewer. The devastated Basra escape highway looked like a traffic jam left out to ruse, or a discarded Mad Max film set, the ultimate Armageddon. The absence of combatants, let alone the dead and wounded, suppresses any reflexes of pity or outrage, and creates the barely conscious impression that the entire war was a vast demolition derby in which almost no one was hurt and which might even have been fun.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
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.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Gazing out at the placid sea of bricky gables, at the pleasant parks and school playgrounds, I felt a pang of resentment, the same pain I remembered when my wife kissed me fondly, waved a little shyly from the door of our Chelsea apartment, and walked out on me for good. Affection could reveal itself in the most heartless moments.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
Remember ... the middle class have to be kept under control. They understand that, and police themselves. Not with guns and gulags, but with social codes. The right way to have sex, treat your wife, flirt at tennis parties or start an affair. There are unspoken rules we all have to learn.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Sadly, life is worth nothing. Or next to nothing.... The gods have died, and we distrust our dreams. We emerge from the void, stare back at it for a short while, and then rejoin the void. A young woman lies dead on her doorstep. A pointless crime, but the world pauses. We listen, and the universe has nothing to say. There's only silence, so we have to speak.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Everywhere you look -- Britain, the States, western Europe -- people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake -- a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Religions emerged too early in human evolution — they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
J.G. BALLARD
Drive, Autumn 1971
Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
In the theatre the playwright is at least the equal partner of the performers, but in film the writer is shouldered aside by director, actor, producer and editor, who together transform the printed word into something far more glamorous and evocative.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot. Soon enough, one of the Americans would be shot down into Lunghua Camp. Jim tried to decide which of the ruined buildings would best conceal his body. Carefully eked out, the kit and equipment could be bartered with Basie for extra sweet potatoes for months to come, and even perhaps a warm coat for the winter. There would be sweet potatoes for Dr. Ransome, whom Jim was determined to keep alive. He rocked on his heels and listened to an old woman crying in the nearby ward. Through the window was the pagoda at Lunghua Airfield. Already the flak tower appeared in a new light. For another hour Jim stood in line with the missionary widows, watched by the sentry. Dr. Ransome and Dr. Bowen had set off with Sergeant Nagata to the commandant's office, perhaps to be interrogated. The guards moved around the silent camp with their roster boards, carrying out repeated roll-calls. The war was about to end and yet the Japanese were obsessed with knowing exactly how many prisoners they held. Jim closed his eyes to calm his mind, but the sentry barked at him, suspecting that Jim was about to play some private game of which Sergeant Nagata would disapprove.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
I had a momentary vision of Brooklands' entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
The suit was a disguise, which I had put on for the first time in six months, after stuffing my torn leather jacket and denims into a dustbin.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
J. G. BALLARD
Running Wild
One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Like many central Londoners, I felt vaguely uneasy whenever I left the inner city and approached the suburban outlands. But in fact I had spent my advertising career in an eager courtship of the suburbs. Far from the jittery, synapse-testing metropolis, the perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25 were virtually an invention of the advertising industry, or so account executives like myself liked to think. The suburbs, we would all believe to our last gasp, were defined by the products we sold them, by the brands and trademarks and logos that alone defined their lives.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
As Neil approached the camp the women's laughter still sounded from their tents. The noise had sent the peccaries stamping around their wire pen and set off a sympathetic screeching of cockatoos and lorikeets. All the creatures on Saint-Esprit, even those destined for the dining table, were celebrating the new addition to the sanctuary family.
J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise