Geoff Dyer Quotes
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Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.
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Stories don't interest me.
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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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I love festivals, period.
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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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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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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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You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'
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For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.
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Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'
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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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It's funny, because people always say when they meet me, having read me - or they read me, having met me - that they are struck by how the tone is pretty similar, in real life and in the books.
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I really like to win at sport.
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I've seen 'Stalker' more times than any film except 'The Great Escape.'
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We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it's well-written, that's a bonus. But we don't often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That's what I'm very interested in.
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I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.