73 quotes
The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself.
Super-Cannes (2000)
I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
Narration for Crash! (1971)
Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.
Cocaine Nights (1996)
I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape.
Narration for Crash! (1971)
All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right.
Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.
High-Rise (1975)
For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
Crash (1973)
I think the new science fiction, which other people apart from myself are now beginning to write, is introverted, possibly pessimistic rather than optimistic, much less certain of its own territory.
The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
Running Wild (1988)
Sooner or later, all games become serious.
Super-Cannes (2000)
In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.
High-Rise (1975)
These days adolescence stretches much further into adulthood than it used to. There's no longer any encouragement to be mature.
Elevator Music (1994)
In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.
Empire of the Sun (1984)
At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.
High-Rise (1975)
Science fiction: The body's dream of becoming a machine. Robotics: The moral degradation of the machine. Typewriter: It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free space of the imagination.
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind… The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
J. G. Ballard Quotes : Does The Future Have A Future? (2004)
The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it ... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty.
High-Rise (1975)
The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.
High-Rise (1975)
Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Crash (1973)