Geoff Dyer

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

“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.”

“The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.”

“When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time.”

“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.”

“Now, instead of loading up your jalopy and heading for California, you take a second, badly paid job; 'The Grapes of Wrath' has turned into 'Nickel and Dimed.'”

“My Tarkovsky idolatry was at its peak, but 'Nostalghia' really didn't do anything for me. 'The Sacrifice' was similarly disappointing for me. Next thing we knew, he was dead.”

“What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.”

“I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind.”

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

“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.”

“Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.”

“One of the things I've really come to realise is that the chances of arriving at a universal truth are increased if you remain absolutely faithful to the contingencies of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature.”

“In terms of target audience, who cares what a middle-aged guy like me wants; most mainstream are not catering to me at all.”

“Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six, and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty.”

“People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's 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 didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories...”

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

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

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

“The business of taking a book and transforming into a script to make this thing called a film - it's a mysterious process to me; sometimes it works.”