One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGEROne can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGERThe essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGERFor those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
JOHN BERGERIf every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGERI use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
JOHN BERGERThere’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
JOHN BERGEROurs is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
JOHN BERGERIf the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGERTracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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 BERGERBuildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
JOHN BERGERIt is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
JOHN BERGERThe 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 BERGERWe know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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 BERGERDeep 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