Top 50 Geoff Dyer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

3. “I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.”

— Geoff Dyer

4. “The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.”

— Geoff Dyer

5. “Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places – they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

8. “In Notes of a Jazz Survivor, a documentary about his drug- and jail-ravaged life, Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie, listen to his recording of “Our Song.” The entry of the saxophone, Pepper explains, is “like the most subtle hello.” Ramamani’s voice is the response to this call; it is Laurie’s hand reaching for her husband’s as they listen. Ramamani tells us not only what it is like to love, but also what it is like to be loved. When I hear her voice, darling, I feel your hand in mine.”

— Geoff Dyer

9. “I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It’s the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

11. “These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

13. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

14. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

15. “Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what’s so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.”

— Geoff Dyer

16. “I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest, I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life. I do it when I’ve not got anything better to do – and even then I often do nothing instead.”

— Geoff Dyer

17. “My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It’s 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 one’s power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.”

— Geoff Dyer

18. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

19. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

20. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

21. “Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he’d never seen one before.”

— Geoff Dyer

22. “Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels.”

— Geoff Dyer

23. “When I’m working I’m wishing I was doing nothing and when I’m doing nothing I’m wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I’ve got to do and then, when I’ve got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I’m out, I’m wondering how long it will be before I’m back home.”

— Geoff Dyer

24. “What I’m really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its “about”-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you’re interested in the subject.”

— Geoff Dyer

25. “Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours.”

— Geoff Dyer

26. “I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing – which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn’t something else I should be getting on with.”

— Geoff Dyer

27. “Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.”

— Geoff Dyer

28. “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’.”

— Geoff Dyer

29. “I think I do have a sort of terrible propensity for boredom and for being bored, even though I am absolutely of the opinion that one shouldn’t be bored and that there is no excuse for it and that it is a personal failing.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

31. “When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things – as opposed to making things up – that did not quite happen.”

— Geoff Dyer

32. “In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

34. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

36. “Arbus would later insist, ’the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

38. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

39. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

41. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

42. “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.’ This is Tarkovsky’s aesthetic in a nutshell.”

— Geoff Dyer

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

— Geoff Dyer

44. “It’s striking how many of the world’s biggest problems, and many of the small ones too. are eliminated by the simplest of solutions – having women around.”

— Geoff Dyer

45. “Mingus had always known that that was what the blues was: music played to the dead, calling them back, showing them the way back to the living. Now he realized part of the blues was the opposite of that: the desire to be dead yourself, a way of helping the living find the dead.”

— Geoff Dyer

46. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

47. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer

48. “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’.”

— Geoff Dyer

49. “Dorothea Lange said that ’the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

— Geoff Dyer

50. “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.”

— Geoff Dyer