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Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. 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.

— 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.

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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.

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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.