J G Ballard bot

Now people really aren't interested in the future any longer.

In the years leading up to the abolition of censorship in the late Sixties, filmmakers and writers and artists were all pushing against those barriers.

Jacopetti's Mondo Cane series of documentary films enjoyed a huge vogue in the 1960s.

Whatever its shortcomings, the Hollywood film has managed to plug itself directly into the limbic system of the planetary brain, the power-centre of our most visceral emotions, bypassing the frontal lobes altogether.

It's like a strange cross between a Conceptual Art installation and a nightclub.

Nothing is true.

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

Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us.

They seem to provide some sort of grit which helps us to digest the business of being alive.

Our greatest evolution may occur when we have long since discarded our biological identity and become computers, which are much more enduring and capable of being endlessly duplicated if anything goes wrong.

You can do all the housework in five minutes if you don't make a fetish of it.

Naked Lunch was a grenade tossed into the sherry party of English fiction, a terrorist novel that was visionary and deranged, and written in a language of its own.

Obviously, through the '60s I listened to the Beatles and the Stones.

The show was on for a month.

My real vocation was to be a psychiatrist.

Yes, I think much of my fiction is an attempt to remake the landscapes of Western Europe and America so that they resemble the landscape of wartime Shanghai, where I presumably glimpsed some truth about myself and the human beings around me.

Every time we open a door, every time we look out across a landscape -- I'm deliberately trying to exaggerate this -- millions of minute displacements of time and space are occurring.

If land-based life began on the beach, there were times in the recent past when it seemed that everything might also end there.

Then came Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and the image of science completely changed.

It's the Stockholm Syndrome in a kind of way: you begin to love your captors because they represent security.

What had the Fates decided?

The trouble with Marxism is that it is a social philosophy for the poor.

Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.

When the exhibition was over, the cars were well and truly wrecked, which I thought was an interesting example of people's real responses to the whole subject of crashed cars.

Bizarre experiments are now a commonplace of scientific research.

The totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

I see the future as a kind of planetary suburbia, an infinity of boredom interrupted by unpredictable acts of violence.

It means not bothering the police.

The porn movie is the true future of film.

I've always thought Malcolm McLaren was brilliantly clever.