Geoff Dyer Quotes
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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 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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Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six, and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty.
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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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The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.
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I really like to win at sport.
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The CGI landscape is another world. It has its own physical laws; it can defy gravity. But surely the wonder of cinematic space is that it is wedded to reality?
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If you're not religious, like me, how do you explain the transformational power that certain places have? They bring an incredible degree of attention to where you are and the passage of time. You're looking at every flower twitching, wondering if it's just the breeze or some magical pulse.
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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.
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We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.
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The series 'Generation Kill' is, along with everything else, a sustained critique of the structural and conventional fictions of 'The Hurt Locker.'
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I first got a sense of that idea of nodality - but I didn't use the word back then - with 'The Missing of the Somme': that sense of a particular place in a landscape or on a map having some kind of tremendous power to draw us to itself... that made me conscious, and since then, really, it has been an abiding concern of mine.
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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 think that if you are a resolute, unswerving atheist, you have that sense that you are conscious of the God-shaped hole that has been left in the wake of any religious belief, and in a way, one is much more drawn to articulate why it is that certain places, or certain experiences, have a kind of power.
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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.
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There's one profound difference between secular and religious pilgrimages. It's inconceivable that a Muslim would feel a sense of anticlimax when reaching Mecca. But for a secular pilgrim, the potential for disappointment is always there.
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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 think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.
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It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.
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Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.
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I was constantly surprised by how much people didn’t know. That’s one of the things about traveling, one of the things you learn: many people in the world, even educated ones, don’t know much, and it doesn’t actually matter at all. (p. 15).
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My reading of serious books about serious music is seriously compromised by the way that I can't understand any musical theory. Any mentions of D major or C minor are meaningless to me.
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The best way to learn was by looking, to become articulate in the language of sight. The eye could learn to look after itself. (p. 180).
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There is a thematic continuity here within Bigelow's work: 'The Hurt Locker' serves up a military equivalent of the thrill-trips that Lenny Nero was hustling in her earlier 'Strange Days.'