English - Writer | June 5, 1958 -
In history books, or the one about the guy who cut his hand off to get out of a canyon in Utah, you really want them to be accurate. But my stuff is such small beer by comparison.
Geoff Dyer
HistoryBeerSmallYouWantHand
It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.
SayMatterHappenedHowReally
I didn't get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London.
CollegeLondonLeftTeachingGet
I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you're spending money.
LifeHomeMoneyThinkHolidaysYou
The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten.
GreatTravelPeopleAmazingWorld
People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.
QualityValuePeopleNeverBooks
I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like.
CharacterBookShortPersonNever
I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.
HomeWhyUnderstandAlwaysFiction
When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
TimeWritingBookYouNewOut
If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.
MeYouFindFictionTakeGoing
I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.
MenCountryChildishOldShooting
I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.
SwordAnythingReadMuchExcept
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