Geoff Dyer Quotes

#1. VARANASI TRAFFIC is shambolic. It's a humbling reminder that the British drive on the left side of the road and we (Indians) drive on what's left of the road. "The traffic is not terrible at all," wrote novelist Geoff Dyer. "It is beyond any idea of terribleness. It is beyond any idea of traffic.

Guru Madhavan

#2. I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.

Billy Collins

#3. The history of sex is the history of glimpses: first ankles, then cleavage, then knees. More recently, tattoos, navel rings, tongue studs, underwear ... (p. 92).

Geoff Dyer

#4. These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.

Geoff Dyer

#5. So far I've only read a page but I like that page a lot.

Geoff Dyer

#6. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#7. Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.

Geoff Dyer

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

Geoff Dyer

#9. The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.

Geoff Dyer

#10. I've always liked things I can just trance out to. Because what that means is that you've escaped the chafe of time. Often when you're bored, it's that friction between you and time.

Geoff Dyer

#11. Then he just let it ring, the phone pressed to his head like a pistol, her picture in his hands.

Geoff Dyer

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

Geoff Dyer

#13. Although I was as zealous in my anti-faith as Paul was in his belief I would be lying if I did not confess to a slight chink in my armour of nonbelief.

Geoff Dyer

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

Geoff Dyer

#15. It was so hot we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep.

Geoff Dyer

#16. ...in Dillard it's the comedy of rapture. Or at least it's a comedy that permits prose and thought to soar while inoculating the rapturous against the three ills of which nature writers should live in permanent dread: preciousness, reverence, and earnestness...

Geoff Dyer

#17. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#18. In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there's this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.

Geoff Dyer

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

Geoff Dyer

#20. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#21. There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

Geoff Dyer

#22. The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

Geoff Dyer

#23. Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours.

Geoff Dyer

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

Geoff Dyer

#25. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#26. It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.

Geoff Dyer

#27. The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.

Geoff Dyer

#28. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#29. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#30. Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places - they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.

Geoff Dyer

#31. 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.

Geoff Dyer

#32. Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty-or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change.

Geoff Dyer

#33. He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.

Geoff Dyer

#34. Everyone was nowhere to be seen

Geoff Dyer

#35. It was impossible to say where one gesture ended and the next began.

Geoff Dyer

#36. A restaurant on the moon could not have had less atmosphere.

Geoff Dyer

#37. I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

Geoff Dyer

#38. You know that feeling when you first arrive in a new city? However tired you are, however shattered by the flight, you are impatient to get out and sample the streets, the life, the action.

Geoff Dyer

#39. Lange claimed that every photograph was a self-portrait of the photographer.

Geoff Dyer

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

Geoff Dyer

#41. 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