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?
Interpretation
The quote reflects an interest in change as a vital part of life, contrasting with a focus on static social narratives.
In this quote, J. G. Ballard expresses his fascination with the concept of change as opposed to the traditional social novel which often relies on static settings and characters. He implies that a dynamic and ever-evolving environment is crucial for survival and understanding the future, suggesting that change is not only an external reality but also an internal necessity that drives his curiosity and creativity.
In practice
During a book discussion, this quote can set the stage for a debate on the evolution of narrative forms in literature.
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.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
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.
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.
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
It is time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won't come back.
Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.
Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else.
Left unchecked, climate change risks not only making the poorest poorer, but pulling the emerging middle classes back into poverty, too.
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