1867) Everyone knows that it is much more difficult to learn a second language in adulthood than a first language in childhood. Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology - hence the ubiquitous foreign accent. Their development often "fossilizes" into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. Of course, there are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure, quality of teaching, and plain talent, but there seems to be a cap even for the best adults in the best circumstances. [...] People who immigrate after puberty provide some of the more compelling examples, even the apparent success stories. A few highly talented and motivated individuals master much of the grammar of a foreign language, but not its sound pattern. [...] Even the adults who succeed at grammar often depend on the conscious exercise of their considerable intellects, unlike children, to whom language acquisition just happens. [...] [In one study, adult] immigrants who came to the United States between the ages of three and seven performed identically to American-born students. Those who arrived between the ages of eight and fifteen did increasingly worse the later they arrived, and those who arrived between seventeen and thirty-nine did the worst of all, and showed huge variability unrelated to their age of arrival.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

1868) [A]cquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter. [...] "Critical periods" for specific kinds of learning are common in the animal kingdom [...] [L]anguage acquisition might be like all other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we display as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is, we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

Interview by Susie Mackenzie
in The Guardian (9/6/2003)

The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational.

Introduction (1974) to Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

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

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. [...] Everywhere - all over Africa and South America ... you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul ... This is the prison this planet is being turned into.

Interview (10/30/1982) in
Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past -- no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

Cocaine Nights (1996)

The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates - the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.

"The Consumer Consumed", originally published in
Ink (1971), reprinted in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (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.

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

The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.

quoted in an information package from
Time Recording (Emit Records) (c. 1996)

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

Notes to The Atrocity Exhibition
(written 1967-69, annotated 1990)

Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us... People will still work -- or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them. ... [So] how do you energize people, give them back some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you're still groggy from last night's sleeping pill. Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. ... Crime, and transgressive behavior -- by which I mean all activities which aren't necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.

Cocaine Nights (1996)

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

Running Wild (1988)

Everywhere you look -- Britain, the States, western Europe -- people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake -- a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.

Cocaine Nights (1996)

• J.G. Ballard: Quotes
• J.G. Ballard: Conversations

Correction: Apparently, I'm having trouble doing simple arithmetic. Ballard was born in 1930, which makes him 77 today, not 76, as I originally wrote. My thanks to Rick McGrath for the catch.