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
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 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
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
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
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
Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
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
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
Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it.
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
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
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
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
Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protestors.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
The complex of an immensely perverse act waited upon her like a coronation.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash