To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGERTo be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGERProtest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
JOHN BERGERParis, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGEREverything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGEREvery authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGERThis is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
JOHN BERGERIf every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGERA 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.
JOHN BERGERWords are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
JOHN BERGERUnlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGERCapitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
JOHN BERGERA peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGERThe human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGERThe contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
JOHN BERGEREver since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGERIt is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER