Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
JOHN BERGERPleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
JOHN BERGERArt, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
JOHN BERGERWithout ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
JOHN BERGERThe spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGERIf every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGERPaintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
JOHN BERGERWhat do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
JOHN BERGERYou 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.
JOHN BERGERParis, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGERYou can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGERA peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGERNakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
JOHN BERGERWhat is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGERBut toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGERThis determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
JOHN BERGERCommon-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
JOHN BERGER