For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
JOHN BERGERThis determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
More John Berger Quotes
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We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
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It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
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Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
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Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
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You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
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Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER