Geoff Dyer Quotes
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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 think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.
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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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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 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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It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.
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I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.
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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've seen 'Stalker' more times than any film except 'The Great Escape.'
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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 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 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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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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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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The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.
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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 got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you're spending money.
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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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Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.
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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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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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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.