J. G. Ballard

“The only truly alien planet is Earth.”

“The shopping mall is the last great civic space.”

“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”

“The consumer society is directed toward a phony novelty. It is fueled by meaningless choice, tastes are manipulated.”

“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 drowned world had become a vast unconscious, the repository of all the fears and hopes of the race.”

“We're living in a world where the only sane response is to be insane.”

“In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.”

“The future is a better key to the present than the past.”

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

“The city was a vast physiological organism, its metabolism dictated by the sheer pressure of numbers.”

“Technology has saturation-bombed the psyche.”

“The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.”

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to enlist the sunset on our side.”

“The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.”

“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.”

“Violence is the only imaginative act of our time.”

“Sex times technology equals the future.”

“In a sense, the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.”