The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
JOHN BERGERThe heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
JOHN BERGERArt, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
JOHN BERGERAll publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGERMen look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGERThe spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGERThe impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGERBut toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGERCompare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
JOHN BERGERIf everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGERLater 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 BERGERWithout ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
JOHN BERGERYou painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
JOHN BERGERThe camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
JOHN BERGEREvery authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGEREthics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGERWhat makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER