Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. - J. G. Ballard

By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I'd seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I'd come across which didn't mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I'd been brought up at a much lower latitude — the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I'm sure this is something one perceives — I mean the angle of light, density of light. I'm always much happier in the south — Spain, Greece — than I am anywhere else. The English one, oddly enough, didn't mean anything. I didn't like it, it seemed odd. England was a place that was totally exhausted.

Already it was clear that the lower floors were doomed. Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.