John Peter Berger (1926–2017) was a prolific English art critic, essayist, and novelist. He was one of the most influential writers of his generation.
Born in London, Berger studied at the Central and Chelsea Schools of Art and launched his career as a painter and a drawing teacher, although he soon turned to write. His famous novels reflect his Marxist ideas and artistic background.
The best-known among Berger’s many works include the Booker Prize-winning novel G (1972) and Ways of Seeing (1972.) Ways of Seeing is an introductory essay on art criticism written as a supplement to a BBC television series of 30-minute films. It is often used as a college text and is has helped transform the way people comprehend art.
Pig Earth (1979) is an anthology of short stories of French peasant life and the first of the Into Their Labours trilogy, with Once in Europa (1989) and Lilac and Flag (1991.)
Actress Tilda Swinton co-produced and directed Seasons in Quincy (2016,) a four-part documentary about Berger’s life, works, and influence.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Berger
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Perfection
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
Topics: Reading, Books
A man’s death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
—John Berger
Topics: Dying, Death
What makes photography a strange invention—with unforeseeable consequences—is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
—John Berger
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
Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.
—John Berger
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Difficulty, Imagination
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
—John Berger
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. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
—John Berger
Topics: Poverty
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
—John Berger
If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen. For me, a storyteller is like a passeur who gets contraband across a frontier.
—John Berger
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger
Topics: Past, The Past
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
—John Berger
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men
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
Topics: Advertising
The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.
—John Berger
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
—John Berger
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