Geoff Dyer Quotes
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I've seen 'Stalker' more times than any film except 'The Great Escape.'
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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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I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.
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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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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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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).
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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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It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.
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I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
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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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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 Tarkovsky idolatry was at its peak, but 'Nostalghia' really didn't do anything for me. 'The Sacrifice' was similarly disappointing for me. Next thing we knew, he was dead.
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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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The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.
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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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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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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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There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.
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I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.
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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.'
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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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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.