John Berger
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.Collection: Space
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. 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)Collection: Reality
Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.Collection: Drawing
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.Collection: Country
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.Collection: Energy
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.Collection: Publicity
Landscapes 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. For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personalCollection: Struggle
All publicity works upon anxiety.Collection: Anxiety
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. 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.Collection: Heart
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.Collection: Oil
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.Collection: Animal
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.Collection: Zoos
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.Collection: Photographer
Compare 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. Deep 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.Collection: Art
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.Collection: Envy
Today the discredit of words is very great.Collection: Hijacking
Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart... Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.Collection: Loss
The 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.Collection: Medicine
What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.Collection: Loss
To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.Collection: Moving
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure 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 natureCollection: Pain
The zoo cannot but disappoint.Collection: Zoos
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passionCollection: Passion
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.Collection: Home
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. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.Collection: Life
The 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.Collection: Reality
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.Collection: Power
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.Collection: Names
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.Collection: Stories
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.Collection: Writing
What 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.Collection: Mean
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposalCollection: Messages
I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.Collection: White
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.Collection: May
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.Collection: Beauty
The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings 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.Collection: Heart
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.Collection: Photograph
It 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.Collection: Writing
To be naked is to be oneself.Collection: Naked
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the pastCollection: Past
There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.Collection: Artist
The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.Collection: Winning
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.Collection: Heart
Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.Collection: Poetry
Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.Collection: Children
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.Collection: Ignorant
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .Collection: Art
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.Collection: Breathing Space