English novelist (1930-2009)
In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
They're listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
The halo of light which had emerged from the burning Mustang still lay over the creeks and paddies. For a few minutes the sun had drawn nearer to the earth, as if to scorch the death from the fields.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
Yes, we gave her drugs - we wanted to free her from those sinister clinics up in the hills, from those men in white coats who know best. Bibi needed to soar over our heads, dreaming her amphetamine dreams, coming off the beach in the evening and leading everyone into the cocaine night.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
Travel is the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes
We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
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.
J. G. BALLARD
Cocaine Nights
A passing wave swerved across the prow, and almost struck the megaphone from her hand. She swore at the playful foam, and listened to the echoes of her voice hunting among the rollers. As if bored with themselves, the amplified slogans had faded long before they could reach the shore.
J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise
Human beings today ... are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
The first person I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this "intelligent" city on the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders. I realize now that a kind of waiting madness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the office buildings of the business park. For most of us, Dr. Wilder Penrose was our amiable Prospero, the psychopomp who steered our darkest dreams towards the daylight. I remember his eager smile when we greeted each other, and the evasive eyes that warned me away from his outstretched hand. Only when I learned to admire this flawed and dangerous man was I able to think of killing him.
J. G. BALLARD
Super-Cannes