Geoff Dyer Quotes
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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 feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.
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One of my great heroes, John Berger, he's in his 80s now. One of the reasons that he's remained young and all-around fantastic is his ongoing receptivity to new things. I think that's important.
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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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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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In the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange produced images of sharecroppers and Okies, which drew attention both to the conditions in which these unfortunates found themselves and to their heroic fortitude.
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Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.
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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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I had to be on my own, just so that I would not feel as alone. (p. 201).
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When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things-as opposed to making things up-that did not quite happen. (p.11).
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It's one of these things that I've been struck by for so long about America. You know, this amazing politeness of American life that's not at all class specific. It's not like people get more polite as ascend the hierarchy of society. Just incredible good manners. It's always been something that I've noticed.
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In terms of target audience, who cares what a middle-aged guy like me wants; most mainstream are not catering to me at all.
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Dave was committed to making it a truly memorable weekend in the sense that he would remember nothing whatsoever about it. 'It’s all about moderation,' he said, 'Everything in moderation. Even moderation itself. From this it follows that you must from time to time, have excess. And this is going to be one of those occasions.' (p. 152).
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Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.
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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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There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.
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I like things that are funny and have a lot else in them besides that - ideas, for example.
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Despite what Wordsworth says about thoughts that 'lie too deep for tears', I think tears are a pretty reliable indication of being in the grips of a profound experience.
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They made two thousand years ago seem like yesterday, and yesterday look like today, just as today would, in time, look like tomorrow. (p. 128).
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If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.
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While admiring the pleasing evidence of wealth, we become complicit in - or, at the very least, recognize the extent to which we, too, are beneficiaries of - an economic system we routinely deplore.
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I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.
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I really have to give the Navy all the credit it deserves. They were so flexible and accommodating, given that everybody on board had better things to worry about than this person coming on board who's just going to be in the way, really.
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Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.