“ 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 glan… 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 r… 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 ou… Geoff Dyer
“ Instead of spending his afternoons prowling the parks and jerking off like this he should have been working on his French, which was so poor that even the simplest tasks – deciphering menus, buying bl… Geoff Dyer
“ The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. 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… 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 wan… 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 always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs. Geoff Dyer
“ There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative. 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… Geoff Dyer
“ The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing… Geoff Dyer
“ I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that. 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… Geoff Dyer
“ In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited. In such a society there would be no more essays on whether… 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 mu… Geoff Dyer
“ New laws are always being passed but they alter almost nothing. Their real purpose is, precisely, to engender debate, to give the people of Italy a chance to express a lively opposition to the state s… 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 fa… Geoff Dyer
