206 Quotes by J. G. Ballard

If you’re against globalisation, it doesn’t achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can’t understand the motive.

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

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.

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.

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead – the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!

But I wouldn’t recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

E. Klimov’s ‘Come and See,’ about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.

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.

By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people’s pigeons. I wouldn’t recommend it.