Geoff Dyer

Notable Quotes



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.

From Geoff Dyer

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

From 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.

From Geoff Dyer

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

From 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 But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

From Geoff Dyer

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

From 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.

From 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.'

From 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.

From 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.

From Geoff Dyer

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