"I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It's the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America."
"I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest, I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life. I do it when I’ve not got anything better to do – and even then I often do nothing instead."
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Source: Geoff Dyer (2009). “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel”, p.56, Vintage
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"One's happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at."
"Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels."
"The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances."