Quotes from Geoff Dyer

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.

metonymy into dinner-party chat back at London beach. I

Most of all, he loved Celia Johnson, her hats,her face,her cracked porcelain voice: 'This can't last. This misery can't last.Nothing lasts really,neither happiness nor despair.Not even life lasts long....There'll come a time in the future when i shan't mind about this any more....

Sheets and towels hung from every balcony. Washing hanging out to dry: that is the real national flag of Italy, emblem and proof of how the fabric of daily life endures.

The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill's kicking a ball into No Man's Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.)

Most people don't want what they want: people love to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it.

The mountains in the background were cut from the same cloth as the sky: a slightly darker shade, that was the only difference. Had we the capacity to analyse it there would almost certainly be a geology of the air as well as of rock.

The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead.

Estamos aquí para morirnos de aburrimiento y luego preguntarnos cómo es posible aburrirse tanto.

It is a simple choice: work or succumb to melancholia, depression and despair. Like it or not you have to try to do something with your life, you have to keep plugging away. Besides, the alternatives to giving in and giving up are never as simple as they seem.

Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'.

The CGI landscape is another world. It has its own physical laws; it can defy gravity. But surely the wonder of cinematic space is that it is wedded to reality?

If you're not religious, like me, how do you explain the transformational power that certain places have? They bring an incredible degree of attention to where you are and the passage of time. You're looking at every flower twitching, wondering if it's just the breeze or some magical pulse.

I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.

It's funny, because people always say when they meet me, having read me - or they read me, having met me - that they are struck by how the tone is pretty similar, in real life and in the books.

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

It's this thing that's going on all the time - aging. Paul Auster quotes the poet George Opren on growing old: "What a strange thing to happen to a little boy." Which I think is so profound.

The ritual of film-going in some sense replaced that of churchgoing, because you share something communal, sometimes mystical.

Physical violence is always a bore in films today. We don't see how much it hurts. We don't learn the true consequences of it.

It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.

It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.