The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life. John Berger More Quotes by John Berger More Quotes From John Berger The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget. John Berger photography god memories Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one. John Berger stories I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible. John Berger writing people world 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 John Berger advertising language messages What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives. John Berger sky people art 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. John Berger injustice impossible may 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. John Berger drawing use white Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. John Berger vision sight men Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something. John Berger pianist painting needs 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 publicity offers stealing All publicity works upon anxiety. John Berger publicity anxiety It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass. John Berger grows book years If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger. John Berger stranger photograph memories What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. John Berger vagrants cinema art 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. John Berger nature drama art 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. John Berger animal pigs two Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. John Berger ignorant common-sense home 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. John Berger heart doors two 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. John Berger normal space giving The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time. John Berger addresses perspective reality
