"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."
"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."
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Source: Geoff Dyer (2014). “Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush”, p.27, Canongate Books
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"Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."
"The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere."
"One's happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at."
"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."
"To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf."