Geoff Dyer Quotes
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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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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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First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.
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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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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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I really like to win at sport.
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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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There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.
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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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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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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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If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.
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What I don't like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
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I remember being interviewed about my first novel, 'The Colour of Memory.' They kept using the expression 'your first novel,' and I said, 'No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.'
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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 really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.
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When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
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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'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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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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Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.
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I had to be on my own, just so that I would not feel as alone. (p. 201).