John Berger

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

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.

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

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

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.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.