J. G. Ballard
FameRank: 4

"James Graham "J. G." Ballard" was an English people/English novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave science fiction/New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (novel)/The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as those found in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash (1973 novel)/Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash Sexual fetishism/fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in Traffic collision/car crashes. The story was later adapted into a Crash (1996 film)/film of the same name by David Cronenberg.

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In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!

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Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.

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What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

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Science and technology multiply 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.

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I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

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The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam...

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I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!

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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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