Quotes by Geoff Dyer

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If its a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. Its only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that Im bunking off from something.

People say its not what happens in your life that matters, its what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didnt happen, or something you thought didnt happen. Otherwise thered be no need for fiction, thered only be memoirs and histories...

The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.

My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. Its not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in ones power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.

You know that feeling when you first arrive in a new city? However tired you are, however shattered by the flight, you are impatient to get out and sample the streets, the life, the action.

Wed never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.

In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didnt have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true.

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, theyll forget all the bad stuff

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do.

It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.

It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited. In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a republic for writers and readers with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiners imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer invests his own being in the process of interpretation. Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art embody an expository reflection which they pertain. In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. The best readings of art are art.No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, The fantasy I have sketched is only that. Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

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.

Im incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. Ive always been like that.

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, for example, where, after the famous line about religion being the opium of the people, he goes on to call it the heart of a heartless world.

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.