Geoff Dyer Quotes

United Kingdom, Writer
June 5, 1958

Geoff Dyer (born 5 June 1958) is an English writer. He is the author of four novels and seven books of non-fiction, which have won a number of literary awards and been translated into 24 languages. Kathryn Schulz, writing in New York, described him as "one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers".

I'm never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape - ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.

Geoff Dyer
- Writing
- Comedy
- Serious
Now, instead of loading up your jalopy and heading for California, you take a second, badly paid job; 'The Grapes of Wrath' has turned into 'Nickel and Dimed.'

Geoff Dyer
- Up
- Job
- California

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 But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

Geoff Dyer
- Up
- Time
- Writing
What I don't like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

Geoff Dyer
- Book
Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

Geoff Dyer
- Value
The more you covet something, the more certain it is that you’ll lose it, and the more devastating the loss will be when it happens-which it will. (p. 216).

Geoff Dyer
It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.

Geoff Dyer
I felt I could no longer take the roller-coaster of emotions of travel, its surges of exaltation, its troughs of despondency, it’s large stretches of boredom and inconvenience (p. 202).

Geoff Dyer
- Travel