Geoff Dyer famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Growing Up #Stress #Class
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

#Lying #People #Perfect
The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Home #Feels
All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Ignorance #Journey #Curiosity
If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff
-- Geoff Dyer

#Memories #Stuff #Helping
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Regret #Writing #Desire
Beware of clichÃ©s. Not just the ÂclichÃ©s that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichÃ©s of response as well as expression. There are clichÃ©s of observation and of thought - even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ÂclichÃ©s of form which conform to clichÃ©s of expectation.
-- Geoff Dyer

#War #Writing #Expression
Iâ€™m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest, Iâ€™ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life. I do it when Iâ€™ve not got anything better to do â€“ and even then I often do nothing instead.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Writing #Roles #Kind
Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perÂseverance.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Giving Up #Trying #Persevere
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

#Opposites #Nine #Charming
I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Jobs #People #And Love
Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Unbearable #Life Is #Terrible
Quite often, ambition operates on a level of irritation. Not even jealousy, just irritation.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Ambition #Irritation #Levels
Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I Âalways have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Book #Writing #Ideas
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

#Thinking #People #Events
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

#Errors #Tunes #Never Quit
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

#Home #Sky #Bird
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 lastâ€”and no one can concentrate on anythingâ€”for longer than about two seconds.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Moving #Two #Expectations
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

#Anxiety #Suffering #Stressful
When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for thingsâ€”as opposed to making things upâ€”that did not quite happen.
-- Geoff Dyer

#Lonely #Writing #Self

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