Geoff Dyer Quotes

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

I think very visually, and I just never thought I had a novel in me.

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.