John Berger Quotes

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

My painting does not come from the easel.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it, and I put pictures in it.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

Each drawing that I've done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.

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.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.

Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone, Can nature show as fair?

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

If some event happens and it seems really important to me and moving to me, I'll write it down in my lyric book knowing that it will come out in a song.