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
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 I was a parent or a kid, I would need a cell phone, and those things are invaluable, but my kids are out of the house now, and I am thrilled when I wake up to not have a cell phone, and feel like today is stretching out in front of me for 1,000 hours, as it seems. – 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
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
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
I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy,’ D.H. Lawrence’s novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation. – Pico Iyer
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
Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did, either. – Pico Iyer
Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. – Pico Iyer
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
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
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
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
Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked ‘on.’ Suddenly, you’re alert to the secret patterns of the world. – 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
It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut. – 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
‘Globalization’ has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it’s nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology – either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll. – Pico Iyer
In barely one generation, we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them – often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. – Pico Iyer
If we want to talk about Gross Natural Product, we have to talk about the King of Bhutan’s index of Gross National Happiness, too. Certainly I have found, as many travellers before me, that people in the poorest places are often the readiest to shower me, from an affluent country, with hospitality and kindness. – Pico Iyer
It’s no coincidence that the word ‘holiday’ suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat. – Pico Iyer
In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether ‘The Age of Innocence’ or the latest by Colm Toibin. – Pico Iyer
Contractions, ‘U’ for ‘you’ and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient – but we wouldn’t want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go? – Pico Iyer
