J. G. Ballard quote: "Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there."

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everyt...
J. G. BALLARD

If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices...
J. G. BALLARD

To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I ...
J. G. BALLARD

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in...
J. G. BALLARD

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rai...
J. G. BALLARD

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find...
J. G. BALLARD

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
J. G. BALLARD

I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like ...
J. G. BALLARD

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbani...
J. G. BALLARD

There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fa...
J. G. BALLARD

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway&#...
J. G. BALLARD

Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spend...
J. G. BALLARD

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and r...
J. G. BALLARD

I admired anyone who could unsettle people.
J. G. BALLARD

Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap a...
J. G. BALLARD

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strang...
J. G. BALLARD

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not nee...
J. G. BALLARD

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics cond...
J. G. BALLARD

I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer po...
J. G. BALLARD

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprun...
J. G. BALLARD

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
J. G. BALLARD

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J. G. BALLARD

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lur...
J. G. BALLARD

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of ...
J. G. BALLARD

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort de...
J. G. BALLARD

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
J. G. BALLARD

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, ...
J. G. BALLARD

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is l...
J. G. BALLARD

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything...
J. G. BALLARD

Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th centur...
J. G. BALLARD

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in whi...
J. G. BALLARD

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basicall...
J. G. BALLARD

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in c...
J. G. BALLARD

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- ...
J. G. BALLARD

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...
J. G. BALLARD

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of r...
J. G. BALLARD

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever...
J. G. BALLARD

I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenu...
J. G. BALLARD

I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned ...
J. G. BALLARD

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in...
J. G. BALLARD

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are large...
J. G. BALLARD

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the b...
J. G. BALLARD

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved t...
J. G. BALLARD

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb...
J. G. BALLARD

In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at ...
J. G. BALLARD

At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to...
J. G. BALLARD

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static bac...
J. G. BALLARD

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...
J. G. BALLARD

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentatio...
J. G. BALLARD

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian...
J. G. BALLARD

I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Cruso...
J. G. BALLARD

One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfort...
J. G. BALLARD

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
J. G. BALLARD

A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satis...
J. G. BALLARD

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baude...
J. G. BALLARD

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everythin...
J. G. BALLARD

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent worl...
J. G. BALLARD

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
J. G. BALLARD

I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-contr...
J. G. BALLARD

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dyna...
J. G. BALLARD

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed t...
J. G. BALLARD

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy...
J. G. BALLARD

I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a...
J. G. BALLARD

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching ...
J. G. BALLARD

The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I k...
J. G. BALLARD

My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-d...
J. G. BALLARD

Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known th...
J. G. BALLARD

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of L...
J. G. BALLARD

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - t...
J. G. BALLARD

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. BALLARD

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basicall...
J. G. BALLARD

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...
J. G. BALLARD

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set u...
J. G. BALLARD

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early r...
J. G. BALLARD

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb...
J. G. BALLARD

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at larg...
J. G. BALLARD

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a va...
J. G. BALLARD

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much...
J. G. BALLARD

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I ...
J. G. BALLARD

There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a ...
J. G. BALLARD

E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the ...
J. G. BALLARD

I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.
J. G. BALLARD

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrate...
J. G. BALLARD

I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doc...
J. G. STEDMAN

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
J. G. STEDMAN

During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it.
J. G. STEDMAN

Once in motion, a pattern tends to stay in motion.
J. G. GALLIMORE

Your self image is your pattern!. Every thought has an activity visualized. Every activity belongs t...
J. G. GALLIMORE

Image creates desire. You will what you imagine.
J. G. GALLIMORE

A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's stil...
J. G. COZZENS

God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.
J. G. HOLLAND

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
J. G. HOLLAND

A man may carry the whole scheme of Christian truth in his mind from boyhood to old age without the ...
J. G. HOLLAND

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
J. G. HOLLAND

I find it quite funny—no, hilarious—that despite my deep hatred for myself, if ever given the ch...
J. "CYLO" G.

While reality and imagination is truth, everything and nothing is reality, for truth is merely imagi...
J. "CYLO" G.

The superiority complex of humans is astonishing. We always speak of other animals as if we were not...
J. "CYLO" G.

Justice is merely vengeance in disguise.
J. "CYLO" G.

Death is our savior from life.
J. "CYLO" G.

I sometimes wonder if I am mad, but then I wonder what it means to be mad. I mean, can you truly say...
J. "CYLO" G.

The heart is wiser than the intellect.
J. G. HOLLAND

There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, and all things in succession. That which gr...
J. G. HOLLAND

Rock 'n' roll is good for the soul, for the well being, for the psyche, for your everything....
HANK BALLARD

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks w...
J.G. BALLARD

Remember, David, the middle class have to be kept under control. They understand that, and police th...
J.G. BALLARD

She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only ap...
J.G. BALLARD

The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.
J.G. BALLARD

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
J.G. BALLARD

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to ho...
J.G. BALLARD

Fashions are born and they die too quickly for anyone to learn to love them.
BETTINA BALLARD

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.
ROBERT BALLARD

We must recognize ourselves in others before we can acknowledge otherness in ourselves.
BRITTNIE BALLARD

They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the to...
J.G. BALLARD

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA...
ROBERT BALLARD

He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs. J.G. BALLARD

Republicans were kind of in vogue and some Democrats wanted to make overtures to the new governor. T...
BRIAN BALLARD

We came down to two suggestions and we (have yet to) decide yes or no.
BRIAN BALLARD

We had discussed the possibility of printing (expiration dates) on the cards.
BRIAN BALLARD

I think his legacy is pretty well assured.
BRIAN BALLARD

It puts to an end any questions of the unseemly behavior. It's a wonderful thing. It keeps everybody...
BRIAN BALLARD

There will be some voter-friendly, or shall we say patronizing, legislation. We'll see some trash, b...
BRIAN BALLARD

I believe strongly in staying out of that. I think it's a dangerous and foolish business.
BRIAN BALLARD

Money goes to where people think power will be in the future. The smart money is on the Republican P...
BRIAN BALLARD

Right now we are in sort of a lull in the action. We have a weak upper ridge over the Hawaiian islan...
BOB BALLARD

This discovery provides historians with the first look at an actual wreck from a key era of trade in...
BOB BALLARD

My mother is with her sister in Arkansas, my brother is in Baton Rouge with his wife's family and my...
BOB BALLARD

I would love for someone with more notoriety than myself who has more broad-base appeal you know lik...
BOB BALLARD

It's got it's own groove, everything moves at a different pace; it's like hey if you don't get it do...
BOB BALLARD

Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best ...
ROBERT BALLARD

It was a tough loss, but I think they understood how hard they played and how hard they battled. Wha...
CARLA BALLARD

The kids never quit and they continued to battle. Basketball is a game of momentum and I just feel t...
CARLA BALLARD

The girls seemed to refocus after the loss to Grove. Their energy was high. We tried to approach it ...
CARLA BALLARD

We'll have our hands full. They're legit. Definitely, they have good team size.
CARLA BALLARD

(He) just walked in, hugged the cheetah, was great friends with him. They were buddy-buddy in a minu...
CARROLL BALLARD

I tried to make a film that was not a lot of empty (garbage). To me, the film is about the relations...
CARROLL BALLARD

It's a picture book. No story. Just photographs of a little boy growing up with a cheetah. We had to...
CARROLL BALLARD

I'm sick and tired of making animal movies.
CARROLL BALLARD

It throws me in the toilet. I'm going to have a lot of trouble getting another picture.
CARROLL BALLARD

The threat from flash flooding is diminishing rapidly. We're not completely out of the woods, but we...
ROBERT BALLARD

Our chances for rain are diminishing and it looks like that will hold. We're sort of at the tail end...
ROBERT BALLARD

If the thunderstorm parks itself above the summits, there's a good chance for snow.
ROBERT BALLARD

So, I'm able to network experts on demand, when I need them.
ROBERT BALLARD

No scientist will sit on (a ship) for that long, reading a book and eating popcorn for the whole tim...
ROBERT BALLARD

I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.
ROBERT BALLARD

It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea trage...
ROBERT BALLARD

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world comb...
ROBERT BALLARD

I'm not prepared to go up to $30 million for this project. The process has been subverted and the wi...
CHARLES BALLARD

I am a geologist.
ROBERT BALLARD

We're usually breaking down film when the show is on. There's not much leisure time during the seaso...
MATT BALLARD

You don't go to Gettysburg with a shovel, you don't take belt buckles off the Arizona.
ROBERT BALLARD

The body is sort of a pain. It has to go to the bathroom. It has to be comfortable. But the spirit i...
ROBERT BALLARD

If people were really, really excited about Ford cars, people would buy more of them.
CHARLES BALLARD

Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whateve...
ROBERT BALLARD

I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong ...
ROBERT BALLARD

H3 sales are through the roof. For every H2 we sell, we sell about three H3's.
ANDREW BALLARD

I wish it was made here, but it's not.
ANDREW BALLARD

I think overall, they have a slight downturn in sales across the country.
ANDREW BALLARD

Fashions are born and they die too quickly for anyone to learn to love them
BETTINA BALLARD

When I used to live in the Brewster Projects, I always thought it would be fantastic to have a phone...
FLORENCE BALLARD

Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Capta...
ROBERT BALLARD

Once You lose love, hope, faith, and confidence in yourself, you lose the people who care about you.
BRITTNIE BALLARD

[But many investors prefer to make offers to property owners before foreclosure.] A lot of times the...
MICHAEL BALLARD

Brakes are typically neglected. It's one of the more important things when you're cruising down that...
DAVE BALLARD

The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful in...
J.G. BALLARD

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - t...
J.G. BALLARD

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back t...
J.G. BALLARD

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
J.G. BALLARD

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in the...
J.G. BALLARD

In big games like this, it just seems to come down to special teams every time. We won last year's g...
BILL BALLARD

In big games like this, it just seems to come down to special teams every time, ... We won last year...
BILL BALLARD

We did not know if he could get the job done, [but] he has played very consistent.
BILL BALLARD

These are high school kids and they make mistakes. Donnie otherwise played a heck of a game for us.
BILL BALLARD

If you've got one guy you're starting and he's not doing well, then you've got other people thinking...
BILL BALLARD

When I do a service I like to go overboard. I make sure it's ready to go. That should be done every ...
DAVE BALLARD

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in a...
J.G. BALLARD

The net result of the competitive tender was that the ESA got two satellites for the price of one.
STEVEN BALLARD

If you're looking for youth, you're looking for longevity, just take a dose of rock 'n' roll. It kee...
HANK BALLARD

This is an unusual and dangerous situation. We really want to stress that to people. It's not going ...
ROBERT BALLARD

Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or event...
J.G. BALLARD

Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral...
J.G. BALLARD

People no longer need enemies--in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their...
J.G. BALLARD

I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he’d had a shower
J.G. BALLARD

The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales execut...
J.G. BALLARD

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
J.G. BALLARD

The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary ass...
J.G. BALLARD

Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J.G. BALLARD

It doesn't get any sweeter than this. It really doesn't.
JEFF BALLARD

A postcard and I'm pining for New England. . .
AMY BALLARD

God's already blessed us because he spared our lives so it can't get no worse than it already was. A...
DOMINICK BALLARD

There's no city, no job, no home, there's really nothing to go back to.
DOMINICK BALLARD

There's nothing down South in New Orleans for us to go back to, so basically, this is a new slate fo...
DOMINICK BALLARD

We have nothing to go back to. I mean you know our foundation is gone. Now it's time to build anothe...
DOMINICK BALLARD

Right now this is our home for years to come. We don't have no plans on moving elsewhere but to anot...
DOMINICK BALLARD

Well, actually I have made the step to call them mom and dad.
DOMINICK BALLARD

Well, we had both looked at each other and decided, might as well, because we have nothing else to g...
DOMINICK BALLARD

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of th...
J.G. BALLARD

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free o...
J.G. BALLARD

We have a great location and facilities. We have things to do here that will attract people to come ...
DAWN BALLARD

No idea is too small or insane.
DAWN BALLARD

It's a good opportunity. We are not trying to run tournaments, just trying to facilitate things. Thi...
DAWN BALLARD

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

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J. G. Ballard

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

J. G. Ballard

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