English novelist (1930-2009)
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
Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
When you were twenty, you accepted yourself, flaws and all. Then disenchantment set in. By the time you were thirty your tolerance was wearing thin. You weren't entirely trustworthy, and you knew you were prone to compromise. Already the future was receding, the bright dreams were slipping below the horizon. By now you're a stage set, one push and the whole thing could collapse at your feet. At times you feel like you're living someone else's life, in a strange house you've rented by accident. The 'you' you've become isn't your real self.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Remember, the police are neutral -- they hate everybody.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We're fascinated by that "other world" where everything is possible.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a hemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan's body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protestors.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Jane had spent too many hours in elevators and pathology rooms, and the pallor of strip lighting haunted her like a twelve-year-old's memories of a bad dream.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
The Thames shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
The complex of an immensely perverse act waited upon her like a coronation.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
I think now of the other crashes we visualized, absurd deaths of the wounded, maimed and distraught. I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents carried out with venom and self-disgust, vicious multiple collisions contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers. I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one-way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
The white façades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium