English novelist (1930-2009)
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. 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.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
The two parachutes fell towards the burial mounds. Already a squad of Japanese soldiers in a truck with a steaming radiator sped along the perimeter road, on their way to kill the pilots. Jim wiped the dust from his Latin primer and waited for the rifle shots.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver's seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
Usually Jim devoured the newsreels, part of the propaganda effort mounted by the British Embassy to counter the German and Italian war films being screened in the public theaters and Axis clubs of Shanghai. Sometimes the Pathé newsreels from England gave Jim the impression that, despite their unbroken series of defeats, the British people were thoroughly enjoying the war.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
He welcomed the air raids, the noise of the Mustangs as they swept over the camp, the smell of oil and cordite, the deaths of the pilots, and even the likelihood of his own death. Despite everything he knew he was worth nothing. He twisted his Latin primer, trembling with a secret hunger that the war would so eagerly satisfy.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
The city was a vast and stationary carousel, forever boarded by millions of would-be passengers who took their seats, waited and then dismounted.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
J. G. BALLARD
Running Wild
They're not really bombs -- they're acoustic provocations.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
It disappointed Jim that none of his fellow prisoners was interested in the war. It would have helped to keep up their spirits, a task which Jim was finding more and more difficult.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
As I left the motorway behind me, the prospect of actually turning the key in my father's front door began to loom in the windscreen like a faintly threatening head-up display. A large part of him would still be there--the scent of his body on the towels and clothes, the contents of his laundry basket, the odd smell of old bestsellers on his bookshelves. But his presence would be matched by my absence, the gaps that would be everywhere like emlpty cells in a honeycomb, human voids that his own son had never been able to fill when he abandoned his family for a universe of skies.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
Jim grieved for these American pilots, who died in a tangle of their harnesses, within sight of a Japanese corporal with a Mauser and a single English boy hidden on the balcony of this ruined building. Yet their end reminded Jim of his own, about which he had thought in a clandestine way ever since his arrival at Lunghua.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
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.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key that would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
Either the world is at fault, or we’re looking for meaning in the wrong places.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Trying to distract Jane, I talked far too much. During the few months of our marriage I had told my doctor-bride almost nothing about myself, and the drive became a mobile autobiography that unwound my earlier life along with the kilometres of dust, insects and sun.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
Nothing about sex ever shocks women. At least, men's kind of sex.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
J.G. BALLARD
Drive, Autumn 1971
Sadly, life is worth nothing. Or next to nothing.... The gods have died, and we distrust our dreams. We emerge from the void, stare back at it for a short while, and then rejoin the void. A young woman lies dead on her doorstep. A pointless crime, but the world pauses. We listen, and the universe has nothing to say. There's only silence, so we have to speak.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash