John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Bergeris an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth5 November 1926
thinking interesting interest
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
dog blessing self
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
grief loss childhood
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
moving world may
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.
sex teenager believe
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
beautiful nature believe
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
dream dog philosophy
The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
envy emotion common
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
marriage different
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
art revenge past
I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
mean artist perfection
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.
feelings this-life immortal
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
inspirational photography light
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
looks relation just-one
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.