Geoff Dyer Quotes
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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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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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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'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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.
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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 only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.
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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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It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.
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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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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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Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.