Quotes by Pico Iyer

About Pico Iyer:

Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin, best known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Pico Iyer

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.

Pico Iyer

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperatu...

Pico Iyer

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

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 sustaini...

Pico Iyer

One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there we...

Pico Iyer

...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

Pico Iyer

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmo...

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 langua...

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

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

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

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

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

Pico Iyer

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

Pico Iyer

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

Pico Iyer

Hello Kitty will never speak.

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

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

Author Bio

  • NamePico Iyer
  • DescriptionBritish writer
  • BornFebruary 11, 1957
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship