Frasi di James Graham Ballard (84 frasi, pagina 3)

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James Graham Ballard frasi celebri

“Molti sono i romanzi oggi pubblicati che avrebbero tratto gran beneficio dal venir rimodellati in foggia di racconti. […] Di racconti perfetti ne esistono a iosa, mentre di romanzi perfetti nemmeno uno.”

James Graham Ballard

Origine: Tutti i racconti 1956-1962, Introduzione, pp. 9-10

“Sento che si ha bisogno di una tecnica non lineare semplicemente perché le nostre vite non sono condotte in termini lineari. Esse sono molto più quantificate; un intero flusso di eventi casuali si sta verificando… noi accendiamo televisori, li spegniamo mezz'ora più tardi, leggiamo riviste, sogniamo e così via. Non viviamo le nostre vite in termini lineari così come facevano i Vittoriani.”

James Graham Ballard

da BBC Radio Three, 1969
Origine: Citato in Charles Shaar Murray, Jimi Hendrix: una chitarra per il secolo (Grosstown Traffic: Jim Hendrix and post-war pop), traduzione di Massimo Cotto, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano 1992, p. 41. ISBN 88-07-07025-1

“Simili a spiccioli nel gran tesoro della narrativa, ai racconti accade sovente di venire trascurati accanto alla profusione di romanzi disponibili, sopravvalutata moneta che spesso si rivela falsa. Ai livelli eccelsi cui l'hanno portato autori come Borges, Bradbury e Poe, il racconto è invece coniato in metallo prezioso, un aureo fulgore che non cesserà mai di ardere nel cuore della vostra fantasia.
I racconti sono sempre stati importanti per me. Ne apprezzo l'immediatezza, mi piace la loro capacità di concentrarsi intensamente su un unico argomento. Rappresentano inoltre un efficace sistema per collaudare idee successivamente sviluppabili a dimensioni di romanzo.”

James Graham Ballard

Origine: Tutti i racconti 1956-1962, Introduzione, p. 9

“Il futuro, inutile dirlo, è un posto pericoloso da frequentare, fittamente minato e con la tendenza ad azzannarti i polpacci a tradimento mentre ti ci inoltri.”

James Graham Ballard

Origine: Tutti i racconti 1956-1962, Introduzione, p. 10

“Nell'epoca postwarholiana un singolo gesto, accavallare le gambe, per esempio, può diventare più significativo di tutte le pagine di Guerra e Pace.”

James Graham Ballard

da La mostra delle atrocità, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2001, p. 41

“Nell'epoca attuale, il paesaggio dei media è una mappa in cerca di un territorio. […] Come fare a trarre un senso da questo flusso incessante di informazione e di pubblicità, di notizie e di intrattenimento, in cui le campagne presidenziali e i viaggi sulla Luna sono indistinguibili dal lancio di una nuova merendina o dell'ultimo deodorante? Che cosa succede davvero, nel nostro inconscio, quando, sullo stesso schermo televisivo, nel giro di pochi minuti viene assassinato un primo ministro, un'attrice fa l'amore e un bambino ferito viene estratto da un'auto sfasciata?”

James Graham Ballard

da La mostra delle atrocità, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2001, p. 131

James Graham Ballard: Frasi in inglese

“Even 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. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”

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J. G. Ballard libro High-Rise

Origine: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 16

“A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”

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J. G. Ballard

"News from the Sun" in Myths of the Near Future (1982)

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

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J. G. Ballard

"J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000511215816/http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html

“Perhaps our own fin-de-siècle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.”

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J. G. Ballard

"Back to the Heady Future", review of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, originally published in the [London] Daily Telegraph (1993)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

“The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.”

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J. G. Ballard libro Running Wild

Running Wild (1988)

“Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.”

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J. G. Ballard libro High-Rise

Origine: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 3

“By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I'd seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I'd come across which didn't mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I'd been brought up at a much lower latitude — the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I'm sure this is something one perceives — I mean the angle of light, density of light. I'm always much happier in the south — Spain, Greece — than I am anywhere else. The English one, oddly enough, didn't mean anything. I didn't like it, it seemed odd. England was a place that was totally exhausted.”

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J. G. Ballard

Interviewed by James Goddard and David Pringle (1975)

“I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.”

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J. G. Ballard

"The End of My War", originally printed in the [London] Sunday Times (1995)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

“Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”

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J. G. Ballard libro Crash

"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)

“At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.”

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J. G. Ballard libro High-Rise

Origine: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 1

“For me the intentions of background music are openly political, and an example of how political power is constantly shifting from the ballot box into areas where the voter has nowhere to mark his ballot paper. The most important political choices in the future will probably never be consciously exercised. I'm intrigued by the way some background music is surprisingly aggressive, especially that played on consumer complaint phone lines and banks, airplanes and phone companies themselves, with strident non-rhythmic and arms-length sequences that are definitely not user-friendly.”

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J. G. Ballard

As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza

“After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.”

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J. G. Ballard libro Crash

Crash (1973)

“Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.”

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J. G. Ballard

Conversation http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/macbeth_interview_1967.html with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967)], published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones