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The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking the world was anything else.

— J. G. Ballard Empire of the Sun (1984)

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More quotes by J. G. Ballard

The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.

High-Rise (1975)

The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world.

My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: J. G. Ballard (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.