Geoff Dyer Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

I had to be on my own, just so that I would not feel as alone.

Geoff Dyer
How long can a coincidence extend before it ceases to be one? Does coincidence have to be momentary? How long is the moment, the ongoing moment?

Geoff Dyer
The point is that the techniques are pretty much the same in fiction and nonfiction.

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
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
David Hare said that the two most depressing words in the English language are literary fiction. I couldn't agree more. But we might soon have to add that the two most depressing words in the American language are creative nonfiction.

Geoff Dyer
My motto is always, "If you're not overprepared you're underprepared."

Geoff Dyer
I find it incredibly difficult to settle and I have very limited powers of concentration.

Geoff Dyer
I felt I could no longer take the roller-coaster of emotions of travel, its surges of exaltation, its troughs of despondency, it's large stretches of boredom and inconvenience

Geoff Dyer
The idea is to generate paperwork. The word could hardly be more apt. Paper is work. Paper is the big employer. Someone fills out a form (in triplicate), someone files one copy, the other copy goes somewhere else to be filed by someone else, the third is retained by the customer for his records. The most insignificant transaction must be scrupulously recorded and logged, filed and stored, even, on occasion, retrieved.

Geoff Dyer
I was constantly surprised by how much people didn't know. That's one of the things about traveling, one of the things you learn: many people in the world, even educated ones, don't know much, and it doesn't actually matter at all.

Geoff Dyer
Dave was committed to making it a truly memorable weekend in the sense that he would remember nothing whatsoever about it. It's all about moderation, he said, Everything in moderation. Even moderation itself. From this it follows that you must from time to time, have excess. And this is going to be one of those occasions.

Geoff Dyer
They made two thousand years ago seem like yesterday, and yesterday look like today, just as today would, in time, look like tomorrow.

Geoff Dyer
The best way to learn was by looking, to become articulate in the language of sight. The eye could learn to look after itself.

Geoff Dyer
When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is 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
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
Virility of one kind or another is so important if you are to feel like a man. You have to be able to perform stunts. You have to be able to show off in front of your woman, do things she urges you not to do because they look dangerous.

Geoff Dyer
The more you covet something, the more certain it is that you'll lose it, and the more devastating the loss will be when it happens—which it will.

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
This book is a ripped, by no mean reliable map of some of the landscapes that make up a particular phase of my life. It's about places where things happened or didn't happen, places where I stayed and things that have stayed with me, places I'd wanted to see or places I passed through or just ended up. In a way they're all the same place—the same landscape—because the person these things happened to was the same person who in turn is the sum of all things that happened or didn't happen in these and other places. Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by that same token, all the things that didn't happen didn't happen there too.

Geoff Dyer
Ruins—antique ruins at least—are what is left when history has moved on. They are no longer at the mercy of history, only of time.

Geoff Dyer
All we can do is keep applying the creosote, propping ourselves up with health and success, trying to keep the rain and the damp and the rot at bay for a little longer, trying to postpone the moment of complete collapse of abandonment for the same reason that one waits as long as possible for the alcoholic drink of the day: because the longer you leave it, the better it will feel.

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
I should have been happy—I was being paid to be here—but happiness does not respond to that kind of imperative; it is no good telling yourself you should be happy.

Geoff Dyer
Once you turn forty... the whole world is water off a duck's back. Once you turn forty you realize that life is there to be wasted.

Geoff Dyer