Geoff Dyer

“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.”

“There are the tears of rage when books get praised when they're so obviously garbage. But then there are so many more that continue to move me: the end of 'Paradise Lost,' 'The Ruined Cottage' by Wordsworth, Prospero's 'Our revels now are ended' speech near the end of 'The Tempest.'”

“The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.”

“I first got a sense of that idea of nodality - but I didn't use the word back then - with 'The Missing of the Somme': that sense of a particular place in a landscape or on a map having some kind of tremendous power to draw us to itself... that made me conscious, and since then, really, it has been an abiding concern of mine.”

“Generally, I'm not anti the novel.”

“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 are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.”

“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 get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London.”

“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.”

“I was studying English, as you will, in the day, and five nights a week, I would be at the cinema. That continued throughout my 20s, which was also the 1980s - there was a lot of really good films coming out then.”

“Stories don't interest me.”

“In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there'd be a late showing of some great film.”

“What I don't like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.”

“People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.”

“I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.”

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

“I'm as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass. I've got too many ailments - left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist - in fact, the whole of the left arm.”

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

“I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.”