I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.

- Geoff Dyer

It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

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.

- Geoff Dyer

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

- Geoff Dyer

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

- Geoff Dyer