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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

John Berger

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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Orphan
Autobiography
Begins
Alone
Sense
Form

More quotes by John Berger

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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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A 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.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
John Berger
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
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It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
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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 passion
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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.
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Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering music with painting poetry with design fine art with propaganda photographs with typography diagrams with action the studio with the street.
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger