Geoff Dyer Quotes & Sayings

It was impossible to say where one gesture ended and the next began. — Geoff Dyer

In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true. — Geoff Dyer

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories ... — Geoff Dyer

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

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

So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war's true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war - which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell - seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively. — Geoff Dyer

Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject. — Geoff Dyer

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

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

If mankind was put on earth to create works of art, then other people were put on earth to comment on those works, to say what they think of them. Not to judge objectively or critically assess these works but to articulate their feelings about them with as much precision as possible, without seeking to disguise the vagaries of their nature, their lapses of taste and the contingency of their own experiences, even if those feelings are of confusion, uncertainty or-in this case-undiminished wonder. — Geoff Dyer

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

My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one's power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego. — Geoff Dyer

Lange claimed that every photograph was a self-portrait of the photographer. — Geoff Dyer

So far I've only read a page but I like that page a lot. — Geoff Dyer

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

Everyone was nowhere to be seen — Geoff Dyer

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

...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

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

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

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

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

In Notes of a Jazz Survivor, a documentary about his drug- and jail-ravaged life, Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie, listen to his recording of "Our Song." The entry of the saxophone, Pepper explains, is "like the most subtle hello." Ramamani's voice is the response to this call; it is Laurie's hand reaching for her husband's as they listen. Ramamani tells us not only what it is like to love, but also what it is like to be loved. When I hear her voice, darling, I feel your hand in mine. — Geoff Dyer

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

The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere. — Geoff Dyer

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

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

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

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

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative. — Geoff Dyer

The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error. — Geoff Dyer

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

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. — Geoff Dyer

When I'm working I'm wishing I was doing nothing and when I'm doing nothing I'm wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I've got to do and then, when I've got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I'm out, I'm wondering how long it will be before I'm back home. — Geoff Dyer

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

The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves out - as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed 'documentary style'. — Geoff Dyer

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

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

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

It was so hot we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep. — Geoff Dyer

If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.' At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last - and no one can concentrate on anything - for longer than about two seconds. — Geoff Dyer

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

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

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. — Geoff Dyer

I had read four thousand pages of letters by Lawrence and I wanted thousands of pages more... I wanted them not to end. And yet, at the same time that I was wishing they would not come to an end, I was hurrying through these books because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end. However much you are enjoying a book you are always flicking to the end, counting to see how many pages are left, looking forward to the time when you can put the book down and have done with it. At the back of our minds, however much we are enjoying a book, we come to the end of it and some little voice is always saying, "Thank Christ for that! — Geoff Dyer

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. — Geoff Dyer

I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing - which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn't something else I should be getting on with. — Geoff Dyer

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

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

People realize that a life that had seemed enjoyable (travel, social life, romance) and fulfilling (work) was actually empty and meaningless. So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they want you to share the riches, the pleasures, the joys. Or so they claim. I suspect that hey just want to share and spread the misery. (The knowledge that someone is at liberty or has escaped makes the pain of incarceration doubly hard to bear). Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life 'meaning' is the one to which I am most hostile
apart from all the others (201). — Geoff Dyer

I've always been intimidated by gyms, have never been able to enjoy the towel-round-the-shoulder confidence of somebody who knows he can bench-press 250 pounds, or even knows what that means or how much 250 pounds weighs. I just know I don't like lifting heavy things, especially since I had this wrist injury which stopped me playing tennis and which means that I've gone from being fit and thin-looking to just a feeble streak of unshouldered manhood whose only saving grace is that he doesn't take up much space, who leaves plenty of room for others - especially now that I was several days into a quasi-hunger strike. — Geoff Dyer

A restaurant on the moon could not have had less atmosphere. — Geoff Dyer

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! — Geoff Dyer

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

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation. — Geoff Dyer

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

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