Now comes the author of such memorable books as Crash, Empire of the Sun, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Super-Cannes, with a collection of his most memorable bon mots.
From the book:
- The new totalitarianism is docile and subservient, and all the more threatening for that.
The New Totalitarians come forward smiling obseqiously like head waiters in third-rate Indian restaurants, and assuring us that everything is for our benefit.
Rockets belong in the age of the 19th century, along with the huge steam engines. It's brute-force ballistic technology that has nothing to do with what people recognize as the characteristic technology of this century: microprocessors, microwave data links - everything that goes in the world at the speed of an electron.
The suspicion dawned that Outer Space might be - dare one say it - boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn't very much to do there.
Americans are highly moralistic, and any kind of moral ambiguity irritates them. As a result they completely fail to understand themselves, which is one of their strengths.
The president of the United States bears about as much relationship to the real business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken.
Modernism: The Gothic of the Information Age.
Money: The original digital clock.
If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Isn't this book as bad as interminable greatest hits compilations?
Surely reading quotes out of context cannot be a good practice.
Oh well, I guess it's just another symptom of the fractured post-modern world - a very JG Ballard world, indeed
2 - David Harold
Actually there's something very rigourous and focusing about seeing this material out of context. Abstracted from the mysteries of Ballard's narratives and the genial bonhomie of his interviews these quotes take on a new level of profundity (and, quite often, comedy.)