Quotes from John Berger

Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.

When I open my wallet to show my papers pay money or check the time of a train I look at your face. The flower's pollen is older than the mountains Aravis is young as mountains go. The flower's ovules will be seeding still when Aravis then aged is no more than a hill. The flower in the heart's wallet, the force of what lives us outliving the mountain. And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

Zorunluluk hem tragedya hem de komedya üretir. ÖptüÄŸünüz ya da kafan?z? çarpt???n?z ÅŸeydir." sayfa 27

Resmin ilk konusu hayvanlard?. Ve en baÅŸtan baÅŸlay?p Sümer, Asur, M?s?r ve ilk dönem Yunan resminde devam eden bir çizgide, bu hayvanlar?n tasvirleri olaÄŸanüstü derecede hakikidir. Ä°nsan gövdesinin tasvirinde eÅŸdeÄŸer bir 'gerçek-gibi'liÄŸe ula??lmas? için biny?llar?n geçmesi gerekmiÅŸtir. BaÅŸlang?çta insan?n yüzleÅŸtiÄŸi, varoland?." sayfa 30

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. It is worth comparing this famous text of Bakunin's with one of Picasso's most famous remarks about his own art. 'A painting', he said, 'is a sum of destructions.

The photographic moment for Cartier-Bresson is an instant, a fraction of a second, and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. The photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant, but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told.

Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.

In the imaginative movement which prompts the impulse to draw repeats implicitly the same pattern...there is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and a au-revoir! Alternately and at infinitum.

Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.

You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn't like money that put in a bank and it will bring you interest without you doing anything about it. A woman is a person.

Like an artist, or like anybody else who believes that his work justifies his life, Sassall – by our society's miserable standards – is a fortunate man.

If the word revolution is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season's novelties, it implies a process. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self.

Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If we storytellers are Death's Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.

Here and in the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woman's body helps towards the same end. 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 of such passion.)

the very basic theme of poetry is that of time passing, the very basic theme of painting is that of the moment made permanent.

The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous daydreams.

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the feeling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.

When an apparition came to an artist, it came almost invisibly, trailing a distant, unrecognisably vast sound, and he or she found it and traced where it nudged the surface, the facing surface, on which it would now stay visible even when it had withdrawn and gone back into the one.

One could put it another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

He wore glasses and you immediately noticed his eyes. They were unusual because their look was both penetrating and sensitive. A man, you said to yourself, who calculated in millimetres.

It's the lies we tell ourselves that make us repetitive.

You put something down and you don't know immediately what it is. It has always been like that. ...All you have to know is whether you're lying or whether you're telling the truth, you can't afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.

The Photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. The painter's way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on canvas or paper. Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.