156 Quotes by Geoff Dyer

I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.

I remember being interviewed about my first novel, 'The Colour of Memory.' They kept using the expression 'your first novel,' and I said, 'No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.'

While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'

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.

I first got a sense of that idea of nodality - but I didn't use the word back then - with 'The Missing of the Somme': that sense of a particular place in a landscape or on a map having some kind of tremendous power to draw us to itself... that made me conscious, and since then, really, it has been an abiding concern of mine.

Stories don't interest me.

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind.

Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.

What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.