Geoff Dyer Quotes

I think I do have a sort of terrible propensity for boredom and for being bored, even though I am absolutely of the opinion that one shouldn't be bored and that there is no excuse for it and that it is a personal failing.

- Geoff Dyer

It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.

- Geoff Dyer

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.'

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

- Geoff Dyer

In terms of behaving in a civic way, I feel my behavior is always exemplary.

- Geoff Dyer

The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

There's one profound difference between secular and religious pilgrimages. It's inconceivable that a Muslim would feel a sense of anticlimax when reaching Mecca. But for a secular pilgrim, the potential for disappointment is always there.

- Geoff Dyer

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.

- Geoff Dyer

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

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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

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.

- Geoff Dyer

The ritual of film-going in some sense replaced that of churchgoing, because you share something communal, sometimes mystical.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

The series 'Generation Kill' is, along with everything else, a sustained critique of the structural and conventional fictions of 'The Hurt Locker.'

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.

- Geoff Dyer

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

- Geoff Dyer

If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.

- Geoff Dyer

I'm as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass. I've got too many ailments - left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist - in fact, the whole of the left arm.

- Geoff Dyer

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

What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.

- Geoff Dyer

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

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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

The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.

- Geoff Dyer

There are the tears of rage when books get praised when they're so obviously garbage. But then there are so many more that continue to move me: the end of 'Paradise Lost,' 'The Ruined Cottage' by Wordsworth, Prospero's 'Our revels now are ended' speech near the end of 'The Tempest.'

- Geoff Dyer

For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.

- Geoff Dyer

As soon as I hear that there's something to get used to, I know that I won't; I sort of pledge myself to not getting used to it.

- Geoff Dyer

In history books, or the one about the guy who cut his hand off to get out of a canyon in Utah, you really want them to be accurate. But my stuff is such small beer by comparison.

- Geoff Dyer

Once you've published a few books, you drag around this ball and chain of a back list. All the evidence of how few you've sold is there. I think a lot of writers my age have this strange experience of going from would-be to has-been.

- Geoff Dyer

We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'

- Geoff Dyer

Borrowing something from one art form and relocating it in another always has a whiff of pretension about it, like in books if, instead of 'Chapter One,' you have 'First Movement.'

- Geoff Dyer

Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.

- Geoff Dyer

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

- Geoff Dyer

I was studying English, as you will, in the day, and five nights a week, I would be at the cinema. That continued throughout my 20s, which was also the 1980s - there was a lot of really good films coming out then.

- Geoff Dyer

In terms of target audience, who cares what a middle-aged guy like me wants; most mainstream are not catering to me at all.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

- Geoff Dyer

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.'

- Geoff Dyer

Generally, I'm not anti the novel.

- Geoff Dyer

In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there'd be a late showing of some great film.

- Geoff Dyer

The essence of my character is an inability to get used to things. This, in fact, is the one thing I have grown accustomed to: an inability to get used to things.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

I like things that are funny and have a lot else in them besides that - ideas, for example.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

I've seen 'Stalker' more times than any film except 'The Great Escape.'

- Geoff Dyer

Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

- Geoff Dyer

I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like.

- Geoff Dyer

While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'

- Geoff Dyer

For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site.

- Geoff Dyer

Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.

- Geoff Dyer

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?

- Geoff Dyer

My evangelical phase about Burning Man is well and truly in the past.

- Geoff Dyer

I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.

- Geoff Dyer

I didn't get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London.

- Geoff Dyer

One of the things I've really come to realise is that the chances of arriving at a universal truth are increased if you remain absolutely faithful to the contingencies of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature.

- Geoff Dyer

There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

- Geoff Dyer

When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time.

- Geoff Dyer

I've always had this belief that you want to write about universal truths.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

Physical violence is always a bore in films today. We don't see how much it hurts. We don't learn the true consequences of it.

- Geoff Dyer

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

Once you've got through immigration, one is always made to feel very welcome in America, once they've let you in. It's a great place to be.

- Geoff Dyer

The business of taking a book and transforming into a script to make this thing called a film - it's a mysterious process to me; sometimes it works.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that.

- Geoff Dyer

I would probably, in my 60s, be ready to start having kids, as long as I was spared all the stuff about it that doesn't appeal to me. By then, I'd have lost interest in practically everything, so there'd be no opportunity cost involved.

- Geoff Dyer

I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.

- Geoff Dyer

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

- Geoff Dyer

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind.

- Geoff Dyer

I really like to win at sport.

- Geoff Dyer

You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.

- Geoff Dyer

I love festivals, period.

- Geoff Dyer

One of the great privileges of my life was growing up in a house without books.

- Geoff Dyer