The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. T….

Everywhere you look - Britain, the States, western Europe - people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake - a certain leve….

People will begin to explore all the sidestreets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually. . . . Sex won't take place in the bed, nec….

Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell..

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing..

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuf….

The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud..

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's h….

Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companie….

The car as we know it is on the way out..

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation news….

Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, w….

Sooner or later, all games become serious..

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant tran….

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after..

A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won't happen..

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action r….

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that t….

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the w….

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those langua….

People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense….