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
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: Death, Dying
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
—John Berger
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 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
Topics: Animals
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
—John Berger
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
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
The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
—John Berger
Topics: Media
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger
Topics: The Past, Past
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
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
—John Berger
Topics: Evil
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
—John Berger
Topics: Grief, Grieving
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
—John Berger
Topics: Art
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
Publicity is the life of this culture, in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive, and at the same time publicity is its dream.
—John Berger
Topics: Culture, Capitalism
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
Topics: Audiences, Actors
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?
—John Berger
Topics: Bores, Boredom
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
—John Berger
Topics: Time, Time Management
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.
—John Berger
Topics: Nationality, Nation, Nationalities, Nationalism
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
—John Berger
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
—John Berger
Topics: Photography
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
—John Berger
Topics: Language
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
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
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
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
—John Berger
Topics: Art
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
—John Berger
Topics: Politics
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ford Madox Ford English Novelist, Poet, Critic
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Stephen Fry English Actor, Writer
- John Fowles English Novelist
- Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti British Poet, Artist
- Bryan Forbes English Actor, Film Director
- Robert Ranke Graves British Writer
- Nick Hornby English Author
- Anthony Burgess English Novelist, Critic
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