Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that fiction is deeply intertwined with human psychology, reflecting our memories and desires.
J. G. Ballard's quote implies that fiction serves as a bridge between our neurological makeup and our emotional experiences. It indicates that the stories we create and consume are not just mere entertainments but are intricately connected to the underlying neural processes that shape our memories and desires, effectively turning fiction into a manifestation of our deepest psychological truths.
In practice
In a literary analysis class, discussing how fiction reflects real human emotions.
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.
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.
Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.
I just would like to keep singing. As soon as I'm not singing well, I hope that I know it, so that I can get off the stage and leave what I have done. I hope I'll know, and if I don't, I hope somebody tells me.
I do feel that I have to use my voice for those that don't have one. I have to do the best I can in my own work to represent my culture, represent the women of my country, of Latin America. What we stand for. What we're made of.
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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