156 Quotes by Geoff Dyer

It’s striking how many of the world’s biggest problems, and many of the small ones too. are eliminated by the simplest of solutions – having women around.

It was impossible to say where one gesture ended and the next began.

Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.

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

Instead of spending his afternoons prowling the parks and jerking off like this he should have been working on his French, which was so poor that even the simplest tasks – deciphering menus, buying bleach to clean out the toilet, ordering sandwiches – became major exercises in pantomime diplomacy.

When I’m working I’m wishing I was doing nothing and when I’m doing nothing I’m wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I’ve got to do and then, when I’ve got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I’m out, I’m wondering how long it will be before I’m back home.

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 that: the desire to be dead yourself, a way of helping the living find the dead.

Maybe all exiles are drawn to the sea, the ocean. There is an inherent music in the working sounds of docks and harbors and there were times when he thought that all the melancholy beauty of the blues was present in a foghorn, wailing out to sea, warning men of the dangers that awaited them. Increasingly.

If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.’ This is Tarkovsky’s aesthetic in a nutshell.