Geoff Dyer Quotes
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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.
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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 But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
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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.
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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.'
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It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.
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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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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).
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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).