For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGERCompassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
More John Berger Quotes
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
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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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You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
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To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER -
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
JOHN BERGER -
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
JOHN BERGER -
Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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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.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
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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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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
JOHN BERGER -
Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGER