Geoff Dyer Quotes

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

If fiction changes things, it's usually because it's a powerful way of exploring social issues. And it helps us to understand people who are different from us.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess the ability to think yourself into someone else's skin.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

I mean I think children love the idea that there are different viewpoints and different words for things and different worlds. And the more that they pretend to be other people, the harder it is for them to hate them and misunderstand them when they grow up.

Trying to imagine what it's like to be someone else is never a substitute for actually living that way, for acknowledging the respect that we need to have for each other's experiences.

For writers, you just have to have the ability to not restrict your imagination. Men can write about women; women can write about men. Straight people can write about gay people; gay people can write about straight people.

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

I don't want to draw from my own experiences in life. I first like to become the character and then think from her point of view.

I do feel like that's what a writer does, is he goes into other people's heads.

There are aspects of writing that require you to image yourself in various roles and guises, to stand in the shoes of others, to 'act' on an inner stage.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.