Geoff Dyer Quotes
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One of the things I've really come to realise is that the chances of arriving at a universal truth are increased if you remain absolutely faithful to the contingencies of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature.
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It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.
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I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind.
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As soon as I hear that there's something to get used to, I know that I won't; I sort of pledge myself to not getting used to it.
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I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.
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I would probably, in my 60s, be ready to start having kids, as long as I was spared all the stuff about it that doesn't appeal to me. By then, I'd have lost interest in practically everything, so there'd be no opportunity cost involved.
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People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.
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My evangelical phase about Burning Man is well and truly in the past.
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In history books, or the one about the guy who cut his hand off to get out of a canyon in Utah, you really want them to be accurate. But my stuff is such small beer by comparison.
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I think I do have a sort of terrible propensity for boredom and for being bored, even though I am absolutely of the opinion that one shouldn't be bored and that there is no excuse for it and that it is a personal failing.
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For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site.
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One of the great privileges of my life was growing up in a house without books.
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Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.
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I didn't get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London.
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Once you've published a few books, you drag around this ball and chain of a back list. All the evidence of how few you've sold is there. I think a lot of writers my age have this strange experience of going from would-be to has-been.
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The ritual of film-going in some sense replaced that of churchgoing, because you share something communal, sometimes mystical.
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Borrowing something from one art form and relocating it in another always has a whiff of pretension about it, like in books if, instead of 'Chapter One,' you have 'First Movement.'
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There are the tears of rage when books get praised when they're so obviously garbage. But then there are so many more that continue to move me: the end of 'Paradise Lost,' 'The Ruined Cottage' by Wordsworth, Prospero's 'Our revels now are ended' speech near the end of 'The Tempest.'
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In terms of behaving in a civic way, I feel my behavior is always exemplary.
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The business of taking a book and transforming into a script to make this thing called a film - it's a mysterious process to me; sometimes it works.
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I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like.
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Generally, I'm not anti the novel.
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Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.
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The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.