The literary critic James Wood wrote that it's not easy to point to writers who've been influenced by Geoff Dyer, but I would argue that it's harder to find one who hasn't been touched by the English author's genre-busting prose. From his bestselling novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, to his collection of travel essays, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It, and Out Of Sheer Rage, a mystifying and engrossing first-person narrative about D.H. Lawrence, Dyer's writing has come to define an effortless but complex, insatiably curious but selective, erudite but highly personal modern style. His newest collection, Also Known As The Human Condition, culls writing from his past contributions to titles as diverse as Vogue, Granta, and Esquire. Topics covered include hotel sex, Def Leppard, and jazz.

After a botched attempt to reach Dyer in London using Skype, I finally got him on the line. The previous day he'd spoken on a panel with David Shields at the London School of Economics Literature Festival. We talked about which contemporary art stars he finds despicable, how he feels if a week goes by without writing, and how he's similar to a member of a certain hip-hop star's entourage.

So, how have you been? Pretty good, actually. Dave [Shields] and I were speaking on this panel about the novel on Saturday. I guess that's what he spends a lot of his time doing these days.

Right, dancing on the grave of the novel. Yeah, it was quite fun to gang up on this other guy who was speaking with us.

Who was the other guy? A guy called Robert Hudson, who's novel neither David or I had read, which didn't necessarily work to our disadvantage. Then I went off to be a writer in residence for thirty-six hours at this really lovely house in the country. It was billed as a kind of reading weekend, and they invite a guest author to entertain them. They were just such a nice group. It was really fantastic fun.

I've really been enjoying your new collection of essays, in part because there are pieces that I didn't know you'd written, even though they had been widely published. One of my favorites is one you did about Fashion Week for Vogue in 2003. It seemed to make both perfect sense and no sense at all that you had written it. Was that something you pitched or were assigned? Oh no, it was totally out of the blue, actually. Alexander Schulman from Vogue, our equivalent here of whatshername in the States, assigned it. Anna Wintour? Yeah, not quite as awesomely powerful a figure. But she had this idea of me going, and I always like a free trip, and it seemed a great chance to really experience something that I had vaguely heard about. It seemed like a crazy thing not to do, really. It's interesting that you mentioned that, because in a way, that's a representative example of what’s going on in an essay that I like reading, let alone the ones I like writing. Okay, there is a physical journey from England to France, and that's not any big deal, but I like the idea of the essay as some kind of epistemological journey from ignorance to some kind of knowledge. So that was an extreme journey, because my ignorance was absolute, and I came to a kind of knowledge or understanding of couture that was maybe very different than someone immersed in the world of fashion might have arrived at.

Is there anything you couldn't imagine yourself writing about? Well, it depends. There are some things that I am not only completely ignorant of, but also completely uninterested in, but I'll consider all reasonable things. A while back there was a guy at Granta who called to say they were doing an issue about 'Work,' and he asked if I fancied the idea of working in a factory for a week. And I said, Jesus, you must be kidding. I come from a working class background. I don't want to do that. I would be in the market for spending a week at a super luxurious resort somewhere.

Do you have any favorite gate-crashing experiences? I think the one that I recount in that essay is the defining one, where I'm at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. It worked on so many levels, and was just a classic of its kind. That would be the main one.

You wrote in the introduction of this collection, "I have always written without regard for the audience of a given publication." How is it that? Well, I suppose the publications that I've mainly written for tended to be the ones that I've read, The Guardian or The Observer, for instance, which is pretty close to my own demographic. In a way, you're asking me a question I can't answer. I don't know how I've gotten away with it for so long, but it never occurred to me not to get away with it. Sometimes when I'm assigned things, people assume I'm going to do things in a certain way or hope that my delivery is going to be slightly offbeat, as was the case with the Vogue piece. Sometimes there is a bit of tension, as it were. For instance, that piece I did for Nerve.com about sex in hotels, they wanted something much more explicit, straight down the line dirty and experiential, rather than theory or cogitation about this stuff.

That's one of the funniest pieces in the book. Right, well, Nerve.com is full of stories about people having sex, which didn't really interest me. It seemed to me that the idea of it was more interesting than doing something less considered.

You've written a lot about procrastination and the ways it's led you into a new project. Has the internet become a source of distraction for you? Well, what the internet represents is yet another discipline you have to acquire, this discipline to resist cruising off into it. I guess there's nothing unusual about my internet use. It's probably exactly what you'd expect for a man of my age.

Your writing about art and photography is so enjoyable and honest. Was this always your experience of the art world, or did it take getting used to? I've always liked going to art galleries. It's one of these peculiar things, one of the benefits of not coming from a traditional middle class background. Art and photography all had some of the thrill of having discovered it for myself. The real turning point for me was my discovery of John Berger. There I learned why all those old paintings of old men in ruffs weren't boring. I also got into photography by reading about photography. You know, the classic route: Berger, Sontag, Barthes. I've always just been temperamentally disinclined from having this separation between "stuff you live with in your actual life" and "stuff you study." So, there are quite a lot of things in there [Human Condition] that are both essays on art or an artist, and which are also something else. Among other things, there are love letters to girlfriends in the guise of an essay on Zadkin and Van Gogh, or a Robert Capa photograph. So I really like that kind of stuff. And that's something I really got from John Berger again. It's not like there's some kind of divide between the experiential and the studied, the lived and what is observed.

It's interesting to hear you talk about John Berger as being so influential to you, so integral to your development as a writer. I'm reminded of your book, Out of Sheer Rage, which is a very personal book about how D.H. Lawrence influenced you as a writer. Your book about Berger, on the other hand, is pretty directly about him and his life, but it seems like you may actually be more influenced directly by Berger. The thing about the book about Berger, is that little book about him is so boring. I feel it really didn't do him justice because it was such a timid sub-academic book. The Lawrence book, well, I was feeling much more confidant as a writer by then. I tend to do this a lot when people ask who my influences were, and I'll say Berger, Barthes, DeLillo. I tend to forget about the writers who are present in me at such a deeper level than that of influnce. So, you know, Lawrence is just such a crucial part of my formation as a person. So he's actually there in my bloodstream as a kind of figure who I have a poster of on my bedroom wall in the way that kids more recently would have a picture of David Beckham. So he's got that real totemic force in my life.

Kind of beyond influence, then? Yeah, exactly. It's deeper than that.

How do you feel about the 'art world,' as a separate thing from contemporary art itself. Are you as annoyed by the art world as Jeff Atman, in Jeff in Venice? Well, I guess I'm not really. My wife works for Charles Saatchi, so she's in the thick of it, and it was on her coattails that I first went to the Biennial. Because of her, I had all the access and none of the responsibility. When you hear about these hip-hop stars, and they always have these big entourages, we always think what scum the hangers-on must be. But when you are a hanger-on, it's absolutely great. This is something that's come up a lot. When Jeff in Venice came out, a whole lot of people were saying it was a satire, and you know, for me it never felt like a satire. It was just me describing what I thought of as a good time. I've always liked parties and all that stuff, but that doesn't mean that I have to buy into the idea that some of this work is any good. One can like the art world as a whole, and still retain your sense of discernment and discrimination. It's a quite debased period in some ways. Tracy Emin, for example, she's often a name that I grab hold of to make some kind of point. She's not so much a person as much as a horrible pathological symptom of something that's dreadfully going on in the art world.

So, I take it that you don't care for Emin's work. Right, but also Tracy Emin as a sort of phenomenon, as it were. The work itself is sort of so negligible, that it's sort of amazing anyone even talks about it.

You wrote an essay in 1999 about having 'Reader’s Block.' Oh yeah. I got over that since then. It's sort of one those things that comes and goes. It's so stupid, that reader’s block. There's no excuse for it. It really does come and go, and it's just awful when it comes back, but it's not terminal, and that's the great thing about it.

What have you been reading recently? I actually did something great, which is I read The Magic Mountain, which I feel I deserve quite a lot of praise for, at my age. That was quite a thing to have undertaken. What is the point of reading, if you forget it the moment you've read it? Well, I was reading a whole load of reportage on Afghanistan and Iraq for that last essay in the book.

Didn't you mention in an email the other day that you're going to Cairo? I'm actually going to Cairo on Friday. I'm writing a travel piece, some sort of trip down the Nile to The Valley of the Kings. It looked like it was going to be canceled, but it went through. This is obviously the best time to go to Egypt, because there will be much less tourists. Everyone's on their best behavior. They'll be really pleased to see us.

Yeah, that's probably true. Do you follow any kind of writing schedule? Not really. In the early stages of writing a book, like everybody, I find it really hard to get going. And I'm always worried that my concentration has diminished. Then gradually, over time, I'm able to do it for longer periods of time. But I like to do something in the morning and I'm certainly aware that I feel much happier at the end of the week, if I've done something than if I've done nothing.

That guilt is really the hallmark of a writer, I guess. Well, it's not so much guilt. It's just an awful sense of having wasted your time. You know, because, it's not like I would have spent the whole week playing tennis and running around, having a sort of good time that I wanted to have when I was younger. Quite often, I realize I was just in my flat this whole time. The only thing that distinguished this week I've had, I will think to myself, is that I didn't write anything, and that just feels awful. But I try not to fret about that because I’m certainly familiar with this pattern. I'm prone to it at the moment, because I've just finished a book.