J G Ballard bot

The car, of course, has to embody contradictions between safety and fashion.

The girl later wrote a damningly hostile review of the show in an underground paper.

It is that, but it's other things as well, and in Crash I've tried to find out what exactly that it is.

Our belief in our unique selves is all we have, the one reassurance that our lives have some kind of special meaning simply by being unique.

Dog excrement had been deliberately dropped into the air-conditioning flues by the upper-level tenants . . .

It's like being the member of a closed institution, like a prison or a boarding school.

Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future.

In a genuine way they have transformed themselves.

But I sense more marketing.

My stuff is about the fall of the American empire . . . I was brought up in an area dominated by Americans, by American cars, by American styles and consumer goods . . .What I've been writing about in a way, is the end of technology, the end of America.

The office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop, the ultimate sort of information crossroads.

There should be a ceremony for everything.

We're not rational creatures.

We drank too many Tom Collinses, ate seafood from metal platters, wandered tipsily around the Vieux Port, and I remade Jane's lipstick before showing her off.

Dinner is usually an omelette.

We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch where violence is just a style.

All those I Love Lucys have reached Alpha Centauri and they're moving on.

The 20th century imagination is film in the way that the novel was in the 19th century.

At times you feel you're living someone else's life in a strange house you've rented by accident.

We're as close as we would be if we were sharing a bathroom with her, practically!

I had begun to shed the hard core of misanthropy, often masked by a professional dedication to good works.

One's living in a continuous cataclysm anyway -- our whole existence takes place in the eye of a hurricane.

I take it that the same process works for the writer, except that the writer is assigning himself his own roles.

It's extraordinary to me to see a complete drawing down of the mental shutters over this.

The crystallizing forest, in which the people become crystallized, describes a state beyond death, a kind of non-living existence.

The leader of the rock group SPK told me that he believes there is a group of some two or three thousand people in Europe and the States who circulate information among each other.

It's called men.

We're obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos.

And they're benevolent!

I was tempted to swim across it, but my guidebook warned that its waters were "cold and treacherous."

It's a pantomime where tinsel takes the place of substance.

We may see a new religious leader appearing, who'll unite the Green movement and all these New Age movements.

All of which I've daily speculated upon in the months before I begin.

The kinds of violent confrontations I conducted imaginatively in the Seventies were like hand grenades thrown into a crowded cinema.

He has a poetic imagination of a very advanced kind -- it's on a par with Delvaux.

I see Kennedy's death as a kind of catalyst of the media planet that exists now.

I learned the importance of sheer story-telling, a quality which was about to leave the serious English novel.

The car wash sequence in Crash -- which I think is one of the great scenes of cinema -- is very ritualistic.

They say the news should not be too explicit.

What you don't have is what Surrealism has: the representation for the first time of the inner world of the mind in terms of ordinary objects -- tables, chairs, telephones.

Above all, Science Fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future.

Brain waves move slowly, as the potassium pumps at millions of synapses throw their cumbersome electromagnetic switches.

There's too much jargon around -- "voyeurism and the male gaze," "castration anxieties."

Los Angeles is an infinitely mysterious city, right on the edge of the Third World.

The whole transformation of society has been proceeding apace in a largely invisible way.

We've studied the TV commercials put out by Governor Reagan of California.

All kinds of chimeras float free; reality becomes a Rorschach test where butterflies turn into elephants.

You're not using up any vital resources sitting in front of a TV tube.

The Tarantino genre: where quirky stylization disguises the dramatic and moral vacuum at its core, an evasion with which the audience colludes as it takes its nerve endings for a deranged roller-coaster ride.

The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality.