When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGERThe happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
More John Berger Quotes
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
JOHN BERGER -
The 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 BERGER -
These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
JOHN BERGER -
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
JOHN BERGER -
One 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 BERGER -
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGER -
The 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 BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
JOHN BERGER -
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGER -
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER -
I 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 BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER -
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER -
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGER -
Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
JOHN BERGER -
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGER -
Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
JOHN BERGER -
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)
JOHN BERGER -
But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGER -
All publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGER -
Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
JOHN BERGER -
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
JOHN BERGER -
Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
JOHN BERGER