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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across ...the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century--sex and paranoia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20...th century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, cons...umer goods, status--all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its sa...fari into the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead--the guy could have been working ...for Andy Warhol!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because ...it is already there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer g...oing to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fanta...sies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »