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In wartime Shanghai I saw so many horrors … Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is, we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

— J. G. Ballard The benign catastrophist (2003)

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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.

All J. G. Ballard quotes →

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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.