Victor Burgin Quotes

#1. Our lives are like the talents in the parable of the three stewards. It is something that has been given to us for the time being and we have the opportunity and privilege of doing our best with this precious gift.

George Vaillant

#2. The paradox of questioning is that simple questions can lead to detailed, on-target answers, but complicated questions get you single-word answers from a subject who doesn't want to talk, and unrestrained answers from a person who does.

James Pyle

#3. Misfortune wandering the same track lights now upon one and now upon another.

Aeschylus

#4. What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.

Aleksandar Hemon

#5. Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.

Scott Adams

#6. Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

Victor Burgin

#7. A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.

Victor Burgin

#8. When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.

Jim Lynch

#9. Live life today like there is no coffee tomorrow." The

Meik Wiking

#10. The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.

Victor Burgin

#11. The only pertinent political question in relation to an identity [or its photograph] is not Is it really coherent? but What does it actually achieve?

Victor Burgin

#12. The town was glad with morning light; places that had shown ugly and distrustful all night long, now wore a smile; and sparkling sunbeams dancing on chamber windows, and twinkling through blind and curtain before sleepers' eyes, shed light even into dreams, and chased away the shadows of the night.

Charles Dickens

#13. Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.

Victor Burgin

#14. We stand on our songs and we stand on the songs that we wrote for other people. That gives us a higher platform.

Valerie Simpson

#15. Even the uncaptioned art photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.

Victor Burgin