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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.
Geoff Dyer -
I love festivals, period.
Geoff Dyer
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One of the great privileges of my life was growing up in a house without books.
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer -
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.'
Geoff Dyer -
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).
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer -
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).
Geoff Dyer
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The ritual of film-going in some sense replaced that of churchgoing, because you share something communal, sometimes mystical.
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer -
What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer -
Stories don't interest me.
Geoff Dyer
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The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.
Geoff Dyer -
For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.
Geoff Dyer -
Have you ever stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai? I'd warmly recommend it. It's super luxurious, and right next door, there's a classic slum. So you can do a quick slum tour and get back to your sanctuary without any inconvenience but with some excellent snaps.
Geoff Dyer -
I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer -
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.
Geoff Dyer
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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.
Geoff Dyer -
Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.
Geoff Dyer -
Generally, I'm not anti the novel.
Geoff Dyer -
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).
Geoff Dyer