Quote

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

John Berger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Alone
Sense
Form
Orphan
Autobiography
Begins

More quotes by John Berger

Image
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger
Image
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
Image
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
Image
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
Image
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
John Berger
Image
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
Image
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
Image
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
Image
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
Image
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
Image
[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. . . .
John Berger
Image
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
John Berger