156 Quotes by 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 to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term ‘awe’.

Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours.

Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty-or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change.

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 out – as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed ‘documentary style’.

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 – which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn’t something else I should be getting on with.

It was so hot we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep.

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things – as opposed to making things up – that did not quite happen.

Arbus would later insist, ’the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

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