We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGERWe never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
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 BERGERLandscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGEREthics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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 BERGEROne can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGEREverything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
JOHN BERGERTo be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGEREvery authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
JOHN BERGERNever again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGERA man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERThe extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
JOHN BERGERPainting 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.
JOHN BERGERThe human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGERThe true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
JOHN BERGERWhen we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGER