Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer (born 5 June 1958) is an English writer. He is the author of four novels and seven books of non-fiction, which have won a number of literary awards and been translated into 24 languages. He has been described as "one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers"


 * "I’m in that fortunate position, and it’s far from a minority position, where the role of drugs in my life has been about 95 percent positive. And some of the 5 percent that hasn’t been positive has just involved time wasted in the company of bores. Ecstasy and LSD have been wonderful. But marijuana has been the most consistently helpful, not just in terms of getting things started but also for sudden insights into all aspects of whatever I happened to be working on. "


 * "Ah, “that useful substance,” as Pynchon reasonably calls it. The kind of grass we had back in the mid to late eighties was very conducive, not just to having fun, but creatively as well. Read back the next day, a lot of what I’d written stoned the night before might be nonsense, but there’d be the germ of something I couldn’t have accessed in my normal state, and that something could be worked up properly while clear-eyed. Marijuana is so integral to But Beautiful that it’s scandalous I wasn’t able to claim what I’d spent as a tax break. But then, in this century, when skunk came completely to dominate the marketplace, I gradually gave it up. It wasn’t giving me any of the things I’d looked for and was giving me a lot of the things I wasn’t—paranoia, brain damage.
 * - Geoff Dyer, The Art of Nonfiction No. 6, interview by Matthew Specktor, The Paris Review