Geoff Dyer Quotes

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

I read a lot of fiction.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

I know how to write fiction well.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

If you're a writer, and you write fiction, that's not all you read.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

I like to read fiction.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.