Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
JOHN BERGERThe past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
More John Berger Quotes
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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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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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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We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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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
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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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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
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The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
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All creation is in the art of seeing.
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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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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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The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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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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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGER