J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
8 quotes
"Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes."
"...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable."
"Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all."
"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."
"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."
"A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup."
"He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother."
"In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace."