Geoff Dyer Quotes

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.

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 'th...

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'...

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 met someone before. It was...

That is why Lawrence, like Rilke, hated photographs of himself. To both writers photographs prefigured an end of becoming.

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...

I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing th...

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...

Photographers sometimes take pictures of each other; occasionally they take pictures of each other at work; more usually they take photographs - or versions - of each other's work. Consciously or not...

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

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.

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.

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.

Like the time he’d dashed into Minton’s out of the pouring rain and seen this kid playing tenor, making it wail and wriggle around like the horn was a bird whose neck he was trying to wring. Breathing...

Most people don't want what they want: people love to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it.

The perfect life, the perfect lie … 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...

Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he’d never seen one before.

Mingus had always known that that was what the blues was: music played to the dead, calling them back, showing them the way back to the living. Now he realized part of the blues was the opposite of th...

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

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