Geoff Dyer Quotes

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I love fiction that sounds like fact. As a matter of fact, I also like fact that sounds like fiction.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between 'reality' and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it's not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.