Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Geoff Dyer - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I love festivals, period.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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.'

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.'

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought - even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.

In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.

I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover.

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It's the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America.

All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels.

One's happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at.

Foreign governments are going to be poring through all these Donald Trump tweets looking for - to try and discern what it means for foreign policy.

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.

To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.

For so long I didn't have any kind of readership at all - I'd get published, but not read - the idea of writing for an audience is so anathema to me, it's never bothered me.

What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.

It's this thing that's going on all the time - aging. Paul Auster quotes the poet George Opren on growing old: "What a strange thing to happen to a little boy." Which I think is so profound.

I would hope that nothing that I write would ever seem earnest because I subscribe absolutely to Franz Nietzsche's claim when he says, "Ah, earnestness, the sure sign of a slow mind." Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl.

The thing that strikes me, from looking at the names so far in the Donald Trump's Cabinet on the foreign policy side, is the one thing that unites them - and that's General James Mattis at the Pentagon, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, even Mitt Romney to become secretary of state - they're all very, very hawkish on Iran.

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things—as opposed to making things up—that did not quite happen.

I would agree on the aging thing. Because, at a certain point, once you start noticing it, it is your subject. And I know young that people, when they get to 30, say, "Oh, I'm so old." But actually, around 50, you do become conscious of it.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal!

Quite often, ambition operates on a level of irritation. Not even jealousy, just irritation.