156 Quotes by Geoff Dyer

The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

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.

All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

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.

One’s happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at.

Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what’s so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.

Quite often, ambition operates on a level of irritation. Not even jealousy, just irritation.

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.

These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.