Geoff Dyer Quotes

I hate to ask about the title, because it makes it seem like that is all I've read of the book.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.

A lot of my favourite books - I should say, not much happens in the books! It's much more about the points of view of the author more than anything else.

I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader.

The cliché I tried to avoid was I hated "teenage sidekicks." I always figured if I were a superhero, there's no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager. So my publisher insisted I have a teenager in the series, because they always felt teenagers won't read the books unless there's a teenager in the story; which is nonsense.

None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

I was anticipating that some readers might misread [the book] ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.

The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

The book is the book and it will always be there. It's a quiet ending. In the book it's a contemplative ending which I think you could certainly do that in a movie.

I hope people will find the book [Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries] a whole lot more than hollow.

Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.