Iyer Quotes

#1. Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

Terry Tempest Williams

#2. In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

Pico Iyer

#3. Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.

Pico Iyer

#4. There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim. He

Pico Iyer

#5. 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

#6. Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

Pico Iyer

#7. Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.

Pico Iyer

#8. Families are so important here," I said. She looked surprised. "They are not everywhere?

Pico Iyer

#9. Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet.

Pico Iyer

#10. Law is not a trade, not briefs, not merchandise, and so the heaven of commercial competition should not vulgarize the legal profession.

V. R. Krishna Iyer

#11. A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

Pico Iyer

#12. Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.

Pico Iyer

#13. A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

Pico Iyer

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.

Pico Iyer

#17. Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do.

Pico Iyer

#18. 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

#19. For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

Pico Iyer

#20. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Pico Iyer

#21. Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America - which means that at some level you've made peace with its rather ugly past.

Vijay Iyer

#22. It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it.

Lars Iyer

#23. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.

Pico Iyer

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Dalai Lama is taking a subtle and nuanced view of politics and he is thinking in terms of events well beyond our lifetime.

Pico Iyer

#27. Gandhi or Bishop Tutu or the Dalai Lama. I think they're really embodiments of what we aspire to and, by keeping them in our heads, we're reminding ourselves of who we could be. That's what we're hoping to climb up towards.

Pico Iyer

#28. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Pico Iyer

#29. Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

Pico Iyer

#30. I think [Dalai Lama]is far and away the most solid, deep-thinking, far-sighted politician I've met, and I've been a journalist for 26 years for Time magazine, so I've met a lot of politicians.

Pico Iyer

#31. Perfect knowledge comes only when you see the world in yourself, just as he who awakes from the dream then knows he saw his dream-world with its suns and stars in himself.

V. S. Subramanya Iyer

#32. One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

Pico Iyer

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

Pico Iyer

#34. As soon as I began to talk to Dalai Lama, I realized that Chinese and Tibetans from his point of view are mostly the same. And as he pointed out during the recent disturbances, the Chinese are suffering under a tough government much as the Tibetans are.

Pico Iyer

#35. Reality seemed so paltry next to castles - dungeons - in the air.

Pico Iyer

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

Pico Iyer

#37. The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.

Pico Iyer

#38. Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds.

Pico Iyer

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

Pico Iyer

#40. ... epiphanies rarely repeat themselves.

Pico Iyer

#41. 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

#42. I romanticised Mancunian despair, W says. I didn't realise that Mancunian despair is only the desire to leave Manchester

Lars Iyer

#43. 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

#44. You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it's only once you've worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options.

Pico Iyer

#45. I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.

Pico Iyer

#46. We have to remember not to tell them, each of them, that they are our new leader. It would only frighten them off, W. says. No one should ever know he or she is our leader, we agree. Only we should know. And we should follow them in secret.

Lars Iyer

#47. All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

Pico Iyer

#48. I can very well understand your frustration, but you must stick to your dreams. Try Harder!

K. Hari Kumar

#49. In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don't have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there's a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world.

Pico Iyer

#50. Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it;

Pico Iyer

#51. As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

Pico Iyer

#52. The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.

Pico Iyer

#53. As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.

Pico Iyer

#54. 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

#55. For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.

Pico Iyer

#56. The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.

Pico Iyer

#57. I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: "Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality," and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment.

Pico Iyer

#58. When I was two years old, I heard about his [Dalai Lama] flight from Tibet. Being very little, I said, "Oh, good Tibetans, bad Chinese." Those were the black-and-white ways that I thought.

Pico Iyer

#59. 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

#60. Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

Pico Iyer

#61. The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others.

Pico Iyer

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. I think the world is always going to be as diverse as it always has been.

Pico Iyer

#65. Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Pico Iyer

#66. 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

#67. I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.

Pico Iyer

#68. Expectation is the greatest impediment to living, running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today.

Lars Iyer

#69. Creativity without commercialism will result in unseen masterpieces by unknown painters.

Shriram Iyer

#70. Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.

Pico Iyer

#71. You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you'll never really make it back into the light.

Pico Iyer

#72. A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.

Pico Iyer

#73. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

Pico Iyer

#74. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that he's met Westerners who to some extent are clearly Easterners at heart, and he would never want them not to become Buddhists just because they happened to be born in California.

Pico Iyer

#75. I think at this point I only write books about questions I really want to figure out. They're indulgences, essentially. I think, 'What would I like to spend five years really thinking about? What could I gain from thinking about for five years?'

Pico Iyer

#76. I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.

Pico Iyer

#77. The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others ...

Pico Iyer

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.

Pico Iyer

#81. 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

#82. I often think we're most happy when we forget the time,

Pico Iyer

#83. If a book doesn't make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it?

Lars Iyer

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. But it speaks for an inner world - and again this is evident in Murakami - that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.

Pico Iyer

#87. Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.

Pico Iyer

#88. Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

Pico Iyer

#89. I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.

Pico Iyer

#90. Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

Pico Iyer

#91. If Allah has willed it that way ... He must have better plans for you child ...

K. Hari Kumar

#92. When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.

Pico Iyer

#93. 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

#94. Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

Pico Iyer

#95. Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?

Pico Iyer

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

Pico Iyer

#99. The more we run from a problem, the more we're actually running into it.

Pico Iyer

#100. The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.

Pico Iyer