Geoff Dyer
Born on the fifth of June, 1958, in Cheltenham, Geoff Dyer is a British writer who has worked across fiction, journalism, and music criticism, conducting his writing life entirely in English.
Educated at Corpus Christi College, Dyer has pursued careers as a novelist, journalist, and music journalist. His notable work But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz stands among his recognized titles, and his writing has attracted a wide range of prizes and honours. He received the Somerset Maugham Award, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, the Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes, an Infinity Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2005 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
That accumulation of recognition — spanning comic fiction, photography, literary criticism, and general letters — reflects the variety of forms Dyer has worked in across his career. His entry in the Library of Congress catalogue carries the authorized label "Dyer, Geoff," the plain administrative notation that records a body of work unusually distributed across disciplines and genres.
Quotes by Geoff Dyer
Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.
First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.
We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.
I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
As soon as I hear that there's something to get used to, I know that I won't; I sort of pledge myself to not getting used to it.
The essence of my character is an inability to get used to things. This, in fact, is the one thing I have grown accustomed to: an inability to get used to things.
Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six, and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty.
When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time.
One of the things I've really come to realise is that the chances of arriving at a universal truth are increased if you remain absolutely faithful to the contingencies of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature.
