English novelist (1930-2009)
Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.
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
The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
I had a momentary vision of Brooklands' entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
The three women were up to their thighs in the surging waves. The foam seethed around them, as if the sea was releasing its spawn in a vain attempt to impregnate them.
J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise
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
Was there a Gulf War? Already the question seems less absurd than it would have done a week ago, despite the destruction rained from the air and the huge number of casualties on the Iraqi side. After the arcade video-game of the bombing campaign, the "100 hours" of ground fighting, filtered through the military and TV censors, were scarcely enough to root the reality of the war in our minds. Push-button death is a game with few risks, at least to the television viewer. The devastated Basra escape highway looked like a traffic jam left out to ruse, or a discarded Mad Max film set, the ultimate Armageddon. The absence of combatants, let alone the dead and wounded, suppresses any reflexes of pity or outrage, and creates the barely conscious impression that the entire war was a vast demolition derby in which almost no one was hurt and which might even have been fun.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
Remember, the police are neutral -- they hate everybody.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
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
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
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
As Neil approached the camp the women's laughter still sounded from their tents. The noise had sent the peccaries stamping around their wire pen and set off a sympathetic screeching of cockatoos and lorikeets. All the creatures on Saint-Esprit, even those destined for the dining table, were celebrating the new addition to the sanctuary family.
J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise
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
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
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
One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Everywhere you look -- Britain, the States, western Europe -- people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake -- a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
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