Top 55 Geoff Dyer Quotes

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

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.

Stories don’t interest me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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

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.

I really like to win at sport.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.

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.

What I don’t like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

I love festivals, period.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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

Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.