Geoff Dyer Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Whatever people may say about my books - and it always amazes me when people don't like them, but sometimes they don't - the epigraphs have always been top-drawer. I think having that at the outset protects me from a lot of potential problems.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Successful, Opinion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Geoff Dyer, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

• I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Style, Form

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Thinking, Relation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Writing, Errors

• I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal!

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Long, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Ideas, Nonfiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I published so many books, which, for years, didn't get published here in America, at all - and which barely got any attention in England. So it wasn't going to take much to make me feel suddenly famous. So - yeah - after 20 years, I'm an overnight success.

  Geoff Dyer

  Book, Attention

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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