"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 (Keeping a Rendezvous)

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."
— John Berger

"My heart born naked
was swaddled in lullabies.
Later alone it wore
poems for clothes.
Like a shirt
I carried on my back
the poetry I had read.

So I lived for half a century
until wordlessly we met.

From my shirt on the back of the chair
I learn tonight
how many years
of learning by heart
I waited for you."
— John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos)

"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

"Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing."
— John Berger

"A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her."
— John Berger (Ways of Seeing)

"Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line."
— John Berger (Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction)

"All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisible dream."
— John Berger (Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction)

"Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart… Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered."
— John Berger

"“Men
look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”"
— John Berger

"'So time doesn't count, and place does?' I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed."
— John Berger (Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction)

"When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitent, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come."
— John Berger (Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction)

"We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession. And this allows the Cultural Establishment to project for a little longer its false rationalized image of itself."
— John Berger

""The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.""
— John Berger (The Shape of a Pocket)

"What any true painting touches is an absence- an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss."
— John Berger (The Shape of a Pocket)

"The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved."
— John Berger (The Shape of a Pocket)

"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

"When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)"
— John Berger

"never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one."
— 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