Quotes from Geoff Dyer

There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.

Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's 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.'

In the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange produced images of sharecroppers and Okies, which drew attention both to the conditions in which these unfortunates found themselves and to their heroic fortitude.

I remember being interviewed about my first novel, 'The Colour of Memory.' They kept using the expression 'your first novel,' and I said, 'No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.'

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.

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.

In terms of behaving in a civic way, I feel my behavior is always exemplary.

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

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.

I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.

The series 'Generation Kill' is, along with everything else, a sustained critique of the structural and conventional fictions of 'The Hurt Locker.'

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

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.

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

While admiring the pleasing evidence of wealth, we become complicit in - or, at the very least, recognize the extent to which we, too, are beneficiaries of - an economic system we routinely deplore.

The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten.

Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.

Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'

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

Once you've got through immigration, one is always made to feel very welcome in America, once they've let you in. It's a great place to be.

We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it's well-written, that's a bonus. But we don't often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That's what I'm very interested in.

I would probably, in my 60s, be ready to start having kids, as long as I was spared all the stuff about it that doesn't appeal to me. By then, I'd have lost interest in practically everything, so there'd be no opportunity cost involved.

Borrowing something from one art form and relocating it in another always has a whiff of pretension about it, like in books if, instead of 'Chapter One,' you have 'First Movement.'