156 Quotes by Geoff Dyer

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.

I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.

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 'the heart of a heartless world.'

I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

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.

I really like to win at sport.

I'm never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape - ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.