English novelist (1930-2009)
He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot. Soon enough, one of the Americans would be shot down into Lunghua Camp. Jim tried to decide which of the ruined buildings would best conceal his body. Carefully eked out, the kit and equipment could be bartered with Basie for extra sweet potatoes for months to come, and even perhaps a warm coat for the winter. There would be sweet potatoes for Dr. Ransome, whom Jim was determined to keep alive. He rocked on his heels and listened to an old woman crying in the nearby ward. Through the window was the pagoda at Lunghua Airfield. Already the flak tower appeared in a new light. For another hour Jim stood in line with the missionary widows, watched by the sentry. Dr. Ransome and Dr. Bowen had set off with Sergeant Nagata to the commandant's office, perhaps to be interrogated. The guards moved around the silent camp with their roster boards, carrying out repeated roll-calls. The war was about to end and yet the Japanese were obsessed with knowing exactly how many prisoners they held. Jim closed his eyes to calm his mind, but the sentry barked at him, suspecting that Jim was about to play some private game of which Sergeant Nagata would disapprove.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
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
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
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
One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
When Armageddon takes place, parking is going to be a major problem.
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
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
Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
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
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
Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protestors.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Remember, the police are neutral -- they hate everybody.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
The complex of an immensely perverse act waited upon her like a coronation.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
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
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
I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash