Quotes from Geoff Dyer

although I was as zealous in my anti-faith as Paul was in his belief I would be lying if I did not confess to a slight chink in my armour of nonbelief.

That is why Lawrence, like Rilke, hated photographs of himself. To both writers photographs prefigured an end of becoming.

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

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.

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.

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

Lange claimed that every photograph was a self-portrait of the photographer.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

in Dillard it's the comedy of rapture. Or at least it's a comedy that permits prose and thought to soar while inoculating the rapturous against the three ills of which nature writers should live in permanent dread: preciousness, reverence, and earnestness...

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

So far I've only read a page but I like that page a lot.

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

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'.

Photographers sometimes take pictures of each other; occasionally they take pictures of each other at work; more usually they take photographs - or versions - of each other's work. Consciously or not they are constantly in dialogue with their contemporaries and predecessors.

Dorothea Lange said that 'the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

since the only way to avoid giving into depression and despair is to do something, even something you hate, anything in fact, I force myself to keep bashing away at something, anything.

I've always liked things I can just trance out to. Because whatat means is that you've escaped the chafe of time. Often when you're bored, it's that friction between you and time.

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

That is probably the most painful part: when you are still tormented by the thought that one last effort of will might improve things.

thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that's kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I've given up. Give up one thing and you're immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded in the rest of a normal lifetime.