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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it. – 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
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
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
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
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
The ritual of film-going in some sense replaced that of churchgoing, because you share something communal, sometimes mystical. – 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
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
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 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
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
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
Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles. – 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
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
