“Unlike what most people think, storytelling does not begin with inventing, it begins with listening.”
. . . “The hierarchy of British authorities did not impress [the political refugees] because they’d seen something harder and fought it. I think I learned from them, not exactly confidence, but a kind of indifference, a refusal to be intimidated.”
. . . “Ways of Seeing was a collaboration. We wanted people to ask questions. It was the opposite of the ivory tower.”
. . . “[Millet, the painter, sensed] that the poverty of the countryside would be reproduced under a different form in the poverty of the city and its suburbs, and that the market created by industrialisation, to which the peasantry was being sacrificed, might one day entail the loss of all sense of history.”
. . . “What I’m talking about now is a very ancient part of human awareness. It may even be what defines the human – although it [was] largely forgotten in the second half of the 20th century. The dead are not abandoned. They are kept near physically. They are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road to the past is actually beside you where you stand.”
Philip Maughan, «“I think the dead are with us”: John Berger at 88», in New Statesman ; London : New Statesman Limited, 11 june 2015 (excerpt La Litera información)