"A few moments earlier the water had seemed cool and inviting, but now had become a closed world, the barrier of the surface like a plane between two dimensions." (James G Ballard, "The Drowned World", 1962)
"However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear." (James G Ballard, "The Drowned World", 1962)
"Speculative fantasy, as I prefer to call the more serious fringe of science fiction, is an especially potent method of using one’s imagination to construct a paradoxical universe where dream and reality become fused together, each retaining its own distinctive quality and yet in some way assuming the role of its opposite, and where by an undeniable logic black simultaneously becomes white." (James G Ballard, "Time, Memory, and Inner Space’", 1963)
"It marked the beginning of the giant’s surrender to that all-demanding system of time in which the rest of humanity finds itself, and of which, like the million twisted ripples of a fragmented whirlpool, our finite lives are the concluding products." (James G Ballard, "The Drowned Giant", 1965)
"Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place." (James G Ballard, [Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme - BBC], 1967)
"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century." (James G Ballard, "Fictions of Every Kind", 1971)
"The role of the writer today has totally changed - he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must outimagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer." (James G Ballard, "Fictions of Every Kind", 1971)
"Even the vagal flushes that seized at my chest seemed extensions of that real world of violence calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of news magazines." (James G Ballard, "Crash", 1973)
"The catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game. [. . .] Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness." (James G Ballard, "Cataclysms and Dooms" 1977)
"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." (James G Ballard, Re/Search 8–9, [interview with Andrea Juno and V. Vale], 1984)
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