JG Ballard

There's a great quote that I've just rediscovered, by JG Ballard, in a collection called 'The Imagination on Trial' (London:Alison & Busby 1981) which goes

"The writer's job is no longer to put the fiction in...People have enough fiction in their lives already, they're living the stuff, it's pouring out of the air, it's affecting everything, the ways people furnish their homes, the sorts of friendships they have, their vocabularies. I'ts quite amazing to see how people's lives are influenced by movies, television and constant advertising."

And that was in 1981. Now I think life become even more fictional. It's a shame though, that the references are all films, not novels. I recently played a game with a class of mine (I'm a teacher) which involved the first lines and last words of novels. A lot of the novels were well known (Moby Dick, the Hobbit, Catch 22, among others), but the comments were all of the type: "Ahh, yes. I think I've seen that one." Even though the game was about books, my students were already talking in terms of films.