English novelist (1930-2009)
Religions emerged too early in human evolution — they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
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
The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
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
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
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
Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
J.G. BALLARD
Drive, Autumn 1971
Either the world is at fault, or we’re looking for meaning in the wrong places.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Sadly, life is worth nothing. Or next to nothing.... The gods have died, and we distrust our dreams. We emerge from the void, stare back at it for a short while, and then rejoin the void. A young woman lies dead on her doorstep. A pointless crime, but the world pauses. We listen, and the universe has nothing to say. There's only silence, so we have to speak.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
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
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
Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
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
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
I think now of the other crashes we visualized, absurd deaths of the wounded, maimed and distraught. I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents carried out with venom and self-disgust, vicious multiple collisions contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers. I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one-way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts.
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
When Armageddon takes place, parking is going to be a major problem.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People