No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGERNo painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGERThose who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGERThe envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGERWhat makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGERIt is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
JOHN BERGERCompassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGERHistory always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGERIt can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGERAt times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
JOHN BERGERHope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGERA cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGERCompassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGERYet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
JOHN BERGERWhen we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGERIt is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
JOHN BERGERThe past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
JOHN BERGER