Geoff Dyer Quotes
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Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.
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Physical violence is always a bore in films today. We don't see how much it hurts. We don't learn the true consequences of it.
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Stories don't interest me.
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We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.
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Once you've got through immigration, one is always made to feel very welcome in America, once they've let you in. It's a great place to be.
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I've always had this belief that you want to write about universal truths.
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I love festivals, period.
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In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there'd be a late showing of some great film.
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You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.
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Once you turn forty...the whole world is water off a duck’s back. Once you turn forty you realize that life is there to be wasted. (p. 165).
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I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.
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I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'
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Ruins-antique ruins at least-are what is left when history has moved on. They are no longer at the mercy of history, only of time. (p. 207).
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The essence of my character is an inability to get used to things. This, in fact, is the one thing I have grown accustomed to: an inability to get used to things.
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For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.
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The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten.
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I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that.
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When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time.
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I'm as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass. I've got too many ailments - left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist - in fact, the whole of the left arm.
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The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.
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I've seen 'Stalker' more times than any film except 'The Great Escape.'
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I was studying English, as you will, in the day, and five nights a week, I would be at the cinema. That continued throughout my 20s, which was also the 1980s - there was a lot of really good films coming out then.
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Virility of one kind or another is so important if you are to feel like a man. You have to be able to perform stunts. You have to be able to show off in front of your woman, do things she urges you not to do because they look dangerous. (p. 64).
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I should have been happy-I was being paid to be here-but happiness does not respond to that kind of imperative; it is no good telling yourself you should be happy. (p. 225).