J.G. Ballard

“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.”

“The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.”

“Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques.”

“Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?”

“The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.”

“First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.”

“Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.”

“In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.”

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”

“Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.'Not as a rule,' Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: 'Perhaps I’m too skeptical, but I can’t take it too seriously.'Kandinski pulled at a blister on his palm. 'No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously.'Accepting the rebuke with a smile at himself, Ward pulled out one of the magazines and sat down at a table next to Kandinski. On the cover was a placid suburban setting of snugly eaved houses, yew trees, and children’s bicycles. Spreading slowly across the roof-tops was an enormous pulpy nightmare, blocking out the sun behind it and throwing a weird phosphorescent glow over the roofs and lawns. 'You’re probably right,' Ward said, showing the cover to Kandinski. 'I’d hate to want to take that seriously.'("The Venus Hunters")”

“...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.”

“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”

“Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.”

“the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways”

“Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.”

“We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us”

“Sex × Technology = the Future.”

“Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.”

“Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?”

“The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.”