Happy birthday, J. G. Ballard! Here are some quotes from the writer’s writing:

“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”

“Sooner or later, all games become serious.”

“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.”

“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”

“Science and technology multiple 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.”

“Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.”

“For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it.”

“I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.”

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

“Civilized 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.”

“I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.”

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).”

“A hundred years ago one has the impression that people had made a clear distinction between the outer world of work and of agriculture, commerce and social relationships — which was real — and the inner world of their own minds, day-dreams and hopes. Fiction on the one hand; reality on the other. This reality which surrounded individuals, the writer’s role of inventing a fiction that encapsulated various experiences going on in the real world and dramatising them in fictional form, worked. Now the whole situation has been reversed. The exterior landscapes of the seventies are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising, mass merchandising… politics conducted as advertising. It is very difficult for the writer.”

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

“The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.”

“A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true … Everybody’s going to be starring in their own porno films as extensions of the polaroid camera. 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, like “Rite of Spring” in Disney’s Fantasia … our internal devils may destroy and renew us through the technological overload we’ve invoked.”

“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.”

“A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”

“Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.”

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It’s a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate’s court. I think it’s far better, as Burroughs did and I’ve tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

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

“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.”

“Science fiction: The body’s dream of becoming a machine. Robotics: The moral degradation of the machine. Typewriter: It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free space of the imagination.”

“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere … [They] were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no personal objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.”

“The more arid and effectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspect of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology.”

“In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.”

“It’s a mistake to imagine now we’re all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection—obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.”

“[S]ometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”

“Some people didn’t like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am — trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature — then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it’s weird or it’s cold.”

“Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us. … People will still work — or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them. … But how do you energize people, give them back some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you’re still groggy from last night’s sleeping pill. Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. … Crime, and transgressive behavior — by which I mean all activities which aren’t necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.”

“Does the future still have a future?”

“Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.”

“The ultimate crime-based society is one where everyone is criminal and no one is aware of the fact.”

“The most perfect crime of all: when the victims are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims.”

“We live in unheroic times.”

“The superheroes of the future will be people who’ll challenge this condominium of boredom, and we’ll find that our Bonnies and Clydes will emerge to challenge the suburban values.”

“We’re driven by bizarre consumer trends, weird surges in the entertainment culture, mass paranoias about new diseases that are really religious eruptions. How to get a grip on all this? We may need to play on deep-rooted masochistic needs built into the human sense of hierarchy.”

“In a sense, we’re policing ourselves and that’s the ultimate police state, where people are terrified of challenge.”

“The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.”

“We live in a world which is now entirely artificial, almost as though we were living inside an enormous novel. You have dozens of little machines in your kitchen, in your living room. The range of machinery that surrounds us is quite incredible.”

“What I fear for my grandchildren is a benign dystopia of ever-present surveillance cameras watching us for our own good, a situation in which we will acquiesce, all too well aware of our attraction to danger.”

“The future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us.”

“The past will disappear and the future will go next. People will soon be living only in the present and will not be interested in the future at all.The possibility of maximizing our own pleasures, our own intelligent pleasures, will be so great, given the worldwide application of computer systems . . .The present will be so rich; the future will not exist as a possibility. One will be able to lead a completely quantified life; the present will contain its own limitless future . . . A child going into an amusement arcade does not think, ‘What will I do and where will I play in five minutes?’—he is merely in the flux of alternatives. Life is like that.”

“The world is ruled by vast commercial empires who shift gigantic cash balances from one side of the globe to the other at the speed of light. This governs the planet.”

“Invisible technologies rule our lives, transmitting their data-loads at the speed of an electron. Vast cash balances move around the world’s banking systems, bounced off satellites we never see, but whose electromagnetic footprints bestride continents and form our real weather.”

“Politics are a pastime for a professional caste.”

“Today we scarcely know our neighbors, shun most forms of civic involvement and happily leave the running of society to a caste of political technicians.”

“Consumer capitalism has a voracious appetite—it needs to keep us buying . . . Now, how do you keep the whole system energized? . . . There’s one big resource they can tap . . . the
latent psychopathy of the human mind.”

“I don’t think that radical change can come from political means any longer. I think it can only come from the confines of the skull—by imaginative means, whatever the route may be.”

“Revolutions in aesthetic sensibility may be the only way in which radical change can be brought about in the future. . . It may be only from aesthetic changes of one sort or another that one can expect a radical shift in the people’s consciousness.”

“It’s the role of the artist to illuminate the real world for the ordinary person—the new world which technology and communications have created.”

“The climate of our planet now consists of a set of very strange dreams that are swimming across the surface of our minds like weird clouds.”

“If people were alert and critical of their consumer environment, there would be some hope that they might wake up. But there is no conspiracy. This leaves people in the valueless world, wandering like aimless Saturday crowds through the great supermarket of life.”

“The media is now the reality that most people inhabit.”

“Today nothing is real and nothing is unreal. We live in an artificial environment, dominated by advertising and consumer mythologies, but these are the closest we will ever get to reality. You will be much more successful, and make more sense of your lives, if you believe what the TV advertisements tell you than if you are skeptical of them. The only eternal truths and realities lie now inside our own heads, but these are difficult to access. The imagination is the best means for exploring that inner space.”

“Most people I know seem to live inside an enormous novel or a TV commercial.”