89 Quotes by J.G. Ballard

"Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator."

"In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement."

"Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all."

"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."

"He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother."

"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."

"It's the most threatening disease of all. It's called "other people"

"Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography."

"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."

"Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes."