Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGEREvery authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGERI wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
JOHN BERGERThe publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
JOHN BERGERThe spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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 BERGERThe stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
JOHN BERGERPaintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
JOHN BERGERA man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERAutobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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 BERGEROne of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
JOHN BERGERWe never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGERA 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.
JOHN BERGERTo live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
JOHN BERGERThe envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGERSeeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER