Geoff Dyer Quotes

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book.

All those people whose faces decorate the shopping bags of Barnes and Noble, with a few exceptions, would never get published today.

Literature is news that stays news.

I see 'Eligible' as a homage, and I see 'Pride and Prejudice' as a perfect book. You can dispute whether this project is a good idea, but you can't dispute my fondness for the novel.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.

When you write a book, you are asking someone to make an investment in their time and money. A column can come and go as the weeks pass, but a book needs to be timeless.

That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.

All literature is gossip.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.