If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGERIf every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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 are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGERNakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
JOHN BERGERPhotography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
JOHN BERGERThe true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
JOHN BERGERWe only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGERAll publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGEROurs is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
JOHN BERGERA peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGERPublicity 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.
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 BERGERThose who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGERWhat any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
JOHN BERGERNever again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGERTo remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
JOHN BERGER