Pico Iyer Quote Quotes

Reality seemed so paltry next to castles - dungeons - in the air. ~ Pico Iyer

... you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart. ~ Pico Iyer

It's not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; ~ Pico Iyer

You don't get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them. ~ Pico Iyer

Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it; ~ Pico Iyer

When love is a commodity, you wonder why anyone's giving it away for free. Or what the hidden costs might be. ~ Pico Iyer

The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others ... ~ Pico Iyer

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them. ~ Pico Iyer

The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake. ~ Pico Iyer

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come. ~ Pico Iyer

[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that. ~ Pico Iyer

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated. ~ Pico Iyer

She liked it? 'I love it
the way you'd love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot. ~ Pico Iyer

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. ~ Pico Iyer

Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down. ~ Pico Iyer

A man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing. ~ Pico Iyer

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in. ~ Pico Iyer

Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits. ~ Pico Iyer

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man. ~ Pico Iyer

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing. ~ Pico Iyer

I'd turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it's harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world. ~ Pico Iyer

You rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face. ~ Pico Iyer

I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from. ~ Pico Iyer

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger. ~ Pico Iyer

It so often happens that somebody says 'change your life' and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine. ~ Pico Iyer

Dalai Lama is very interested in learning from and sharing tips with people in other traditions, but he always stresses that we shouldn't underestimate the important differences between them. ~ Pico Iyer

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. ~ Pico Iyer

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams. ~ Pico Iyer

Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. ~ Pico Iyer

Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered. ~ Pico Iyer

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice ~ Pico Iyer

Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren't so easy. ~ Pico Iyer

To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish. ~ Pico Iyer

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever. ~ Pico Iyer

We now have access, increasingly, to more and more cultures across the globe, and the result is that restlesness has gone global, and hopdfulness, and the sense of an answer being found somewhere else. ~ Pico Iyer

Even as we fret about the changes our progress wreaks in the air and on the airwaves, in forests and on streets, we hardly worry about the change it is working in ourselves, the new kind of soul that is being born out of a new kind of life. Yet this could be the most dangerous development of all, and the least examined. " -Pico Iyer ~ Pico Iyer

Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do. ~ Pico Iyer

Yet [Dalai Lama] has said very strongly that basic freedoms of thought and speech have to be respected in Tibet and they're not at the moment. Tolerance doesn't mean accepting what's unfair. ~ Pico Iyer

The more we run from a problem, the more we're actually running into it. ~ Pico Iyer

More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences; religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life. ~ Pico Iyer

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. ~ Pico Iyer

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure. ~ Pico Iyer

Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.' ~ Pico Iyer

Though I knew that poverty certainly didn't buy happiness, I wasn't convinced that money did, either. ~ Pico Iyer

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. ~ Pico Iyer

As he turned round and drove away, he saw her standing in the driveway, in her white dress, looking for all the world like a child dropped off against her will after a custody weekend. ~ Pico Iyer

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once. ~ Pico Iyer

I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you. ~ Pico Iyer

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions. ~ Pico Iyer

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves. ~ Pico Iyer

The Dalai Lama says don't pray for peace, don't wait for peace, don't talk about peace - do it right now. ~ Pico Iyer

As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, "It matters not where or how far you travel - the farther commonly the worse - but how much alive you are." Two ~ Pico Iyer

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals. ~ Pico Iyer

Hello Kitty will never speak. ~ Pico Iyer

The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong. ~ Pico Iyer

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore. ~ Pico Iyer

A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet. ~ Pico Iyer

The recipe to an unhappy life in Japan is to want to be Japanese if you are not. Anyone who wants to penetrate the country is setting themselves up for tears and disappointment. ~ Pico Iyer

Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today. ~ Pico Iyer

I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would. ~ Pico Iyer

The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion. ~ Pico Iyer

If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards. ~ Pico Iyer

Something in us is telling us we're moving too fast, at a pace dictated by machines rather than by anything human, and that unless we take conscious measures, we'll permanently be out of breath. ~ Pico Iyer

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home. ~ Pico Iyer

Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around - a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise. ~ Pico Iyer

In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night. ~ Pico Iyer

If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it's easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer - or a spy; you've always got, analytically, a ticket out. ~ Pico Iyer

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied. ~ Pico Iyer

Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all. ~ Pico Iyer

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation. ~ Pico Iyer

There are literally Internet rescue camps in China and Korea to deal with children that are addicted. Internet disorder is maybe going to count as a psychiatric disorder in a couple of years. ~ Pico Iyer

For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands. ~ Pico Iyer

Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours. ~ Pico Iyer

It's an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive. ~ Pico Iyer

We readily go to the health club when our doctor suggests we need more exercise, but we regularly neglect the 'mental health club' that our well-being more truly requires. ~ Pico Iyer

Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand. ~ Pico Iyer

Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. ~ Pico Iyer

It's kind of spooky sometimes,' a Canadian lawyer said to me one day. 'There you are, in the Kim Do Hotel, it's ninety-three degrees outside, and it's April eighth, and you're listening to a Vietnamese cover version of Jingle Bells. ~ Pico Iyer

It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind. ~ Pico Iyer

You can only make sense of the online world by going offline and by getting the wisdom and emotional clarity to know how to make the best use of the Internet. ~ Pico Iyer

A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours - one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark. ~ Pico Iyer

I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads - in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation - that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind. ~ Pico Iyer

The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home. ~ Pico Iyer

I'm very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can't think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not. ~ Pico Iyer

The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with. ~ Pico Iyer

It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. ~ Pico Iyer

I couldn't follow the events of September 11 because I was proofreading a novel I'd just completed - on Islam and its quarrel with the West - that I'd promised, six months earlier, to deliver to my editor on September 12, 2001. ~ Pico Iyer

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within. ~ Pico Iyer

All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while. ~ Pico Iyer

What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century. ~ Pico Iyer

To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath. ~ Pico Iyer

Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics. ~ Pico Iyer

And it's only by going nowhere - by sitting still or letting my mind relax - that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out. ~ Pico Iyer

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. ~ Pico Iyer

I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about ... and find a home. ~ Pico Iyer

Most of us who have been lucky enough to hear, read and see the Dalai Lama, often come away thinking, "What a kind, inspiring and golden human being!" That is true, but I think it does him an injustice. ~ Pico Iyer

Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes - which means we're never caught up with our lives. ~ Pico Iyer

If you'd asked me some years ago, I would have said [Dalai Lama] is an extraordinarily compassionate, clear-sighted, calm human being. But now, I'm more convinced than ever that his political positions as well as his spiritual positions arise out of such precise and realistic thinking that they're extremely sound. ~ Pico Iyer

How to adjust to a world in which the climax of a scene - and sometimes the central event - is going to sleep? We're going to have to adapt, maybe even invert our sense of priority and our assumptions about what constitutes drama, as most of us foreigners have to do when traveling to Japan. ~ Pico Iyer

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head. ~ Pico Iyer