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a thought from JG Ballard every day by: @mbonsall.bsky.social using: https://bluebotsdonequick.com more: https://fentonville.co.uk/digital-ballard/
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Eliot.

That's a public service channel.

That aspect is true of my characters generally -- they're driven by personal mythology.

What did they make of it all?

One has to foster one's own imagination to a very intense degree, far more than most people realize.

The whole thing is Orwellian and no one protests -- there seems to be a passive strain in the English psyche.

So time has dismantled itself.

I consider the city to be an outdated structure, incapable of expressing the deep dreams of our time.

Spielberg displayed most of the qualities present in his subsequent blockbusters: the absence of stars or glamorous roles, the suburban characters and locations, the downplaying of dialogue and dramatic complexity in favor of a relentless, through-the-windscreen view of the road ahead.

Going mad is their only way of staying sane.

Space is a totally alien environment.

The satellite information relays that transmitted the images of Armstrong landing on the moon themselves made the whole exercise redundant and out-of-date.

Politics is a branch of advertising.

But the institution has proved to have all the inertia and flexibility of Stonehenge.

An enormous apple fills a room.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous.

The windscreen was shattered . . . I had the car repaired.

The whole exhibition illustrated a scene from my previous book, Atrocity Exhibition, where my "Travis" hero stages a similarly despairing exhibition.

The mystery of consciousness and childhood.

It's like those Andy Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building or of somebody sleeping.

We simply don't need so many men today.

Sometimes, I could no longer see their faces.

The constants of our lives, which most of us ignore: the wonder of existence.

I've watched the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement, which although it's well-meaning, seems to me that the people in it are living in a dream world in the post-nuclear world.

On one of the empty coffin shelves was a collection of metal objects stripped from his car, a wing mirror and manufacturer's medallion, strips of chromium trim, laid out like an elaborate altarpiece on which would one day repose the bones of a revered saint.

So I'd had enough of it in two years.

Every time we open a door, every time we look out across a landscape -- I'm deliberately trying to exaggerate this -- millions of minute displacements of time and space are occurring.

My characters are almost all engaged in mythologizing themselves and in then exploring that mythology to the furthest end, whatever the price.

The whole car culture had come into being with everything that went with it; dating and sex in cars suddenly became a part of the global way of life.

An almost intangible network of rivalries and intrigues bound them together.

And I still do.

I'm not saying we should abandon them altogether, but that we should wait to see where they fit into the new scheme of things.

Most people don't realize which side of the bars they are.

The next religion might come from the world of fashion rather than from any conventional one.

The Internet is our confession box.

The automobile culture that Americans have had since the 1920s really arrived in Europe in the 1960s . . . dating and sex in cars suddenly became a part of the global way of life.

The contents of a wife's dressing table were as close as a husband could ever get to her unconscious mind.

Or even on the same street.

In many respects, we're living inside a Science-Fiction novel, and it's not the S-F of Star Trek.

Today's tourist goes nowhere . . .All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit . . .Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.

Fashions in biography change, as they do in the novel.

It's all about the different levels of creation, acts of imagination, that take place today.

I never said we should shy away from or retreat from technology.

The alternatives aren't Charles Manson on the one hand and -- I don't know, the Puritan fathers on the other.

All his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves.

The reaction they provoked: a huge paranoid spasm that led to the Iraq war and the rise of the neo-cons, would have delighted them.

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring.

Hallucinogenic drugs: The kaleidoscope's view of the eye.