Geoff Dyer Quotes

When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.

The truth is more important than the facts

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

Never question the relevance of truth, but always question the truth of relevance.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

Fact and fiction are different truths.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Stories are a different kind of true.

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.