Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a farewell to surreal and extravagant experiences.
In this quote, J. G. Ballard expresses a sense of departure from a world filled with surreal imagery and luxury, symbolizing the end of an era or a personal journey. The vivid descriptions evoke a dreamlike quality, hinting at the complexity of emotions tied to leaving behind something beautiful and fantastical.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about transitions in life.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Science and technology multiply 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.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
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.
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 will to enforce significant change.
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
I believe that Judy Garland's artistry was so fine. I mean, when people say: 'oh, she brought so much of her life to her music', I don't really believe that. I believe that she didn't have to. She just was a moving human being. That was her gift.
If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
I think cooks that are just interested in molecular gastronomy are cooks that will never be chefs.
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