206 Quotes by J. G. Ballard

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.

Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it’s we women who control magic.

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.

If I don’t write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

Selfish men make the best lovers. They’re prepared to invest in the women’s pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I’m intensely interested in change – probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don’t you realize that those two species are extinct now?

If their work is satisfying people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it’s shroud.