She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there.

— J.G. Ballard

So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.

— J.G. Ballard

The 90s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘subcontract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.

— J.G. Ballard

...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

— J.G. Ballard

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

— J.G. Ballard

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

— J.G. Ballard

Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques.

— J.G. Ballard

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlie realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia… In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

— J.G. Ballard

The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.

— J.G. Ballard

The run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways

— J.G. Ballard