270 Quotes by John Berger

Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.

Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.

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.

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection – the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.

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.

The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester’s motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.

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 as beggar is a reminder of nothing.

The canvas is on the easel now, as large and white as a sheet that has never been slept in. My paintings have become larger and larger as I have grown older. As a young painter you are overwhelmed by the complexity of your subject. Every crease, every dimple, is an equally startling revelation. It’s like your first girl. You don’t understand her. You can only copy her – hesitantly. Later you become shamelessly yourself. You create in your image – as nearly life-size as possible.

All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.