Iyer Quotes & Sayings

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

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

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing. — 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 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

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

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

Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler's question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. "For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky," Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn't strike everyone. "There's nothing I can do, so it's really quite liberating. There's nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It's beautiful." Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn't mean a blue sky isn't always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again. His — Pico Iyer

When I went to college, also in the South, I took every opportunity to celebrate my cultural background and to press for diversity efforts on campus. Still, I linked race mainly with notions of multiculturalism and inclusion and less with justice and equity. — Deepa 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

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

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

It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it. — Lars Iyer

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

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

A comma ... catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table. — 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

My story - the story of the son of Jainulabdeen, who lived for over a hundred years on Mosque Street in Rameswaram island and died there; the story of a lad who sold newspapers to help his brother; the story of a pupil reared by Sivasubramania Iyer and Iyadurai Solomon; the story of a student taught by teachers like Pandalai; the story of an engineer spotted by MGK Menon and groomed by the legendary Prof. Sarabhai; the story of a scientist tested by failures and setbacks; the story of a leader supported by a large team of brilliant and dedicated professionals. This story will end with me, for I have no belongings in the worldly sense. I have acquired nothing, built nothing, possess nothing - no family, sons, daughters. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

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

I can very well understand your frustration, but you must stick to your dreams. Try Harder! — K. Hari Kumar

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

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

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

Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world. — Pico Iyer

I think Dalai Lama efforts have been heroic. — 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

Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he's seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he's seen City of Angels on video. — Pico Iyer

Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think ... In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think. — 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

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad--very bad--and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come. — Lars 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 temperature is ... frozen. — Pico Iyer

A son may choose never to listen to a father, but a father, as Greene saw as well as anyone, is always bound to a son, and real disinheritance is hard. Another advantage virtual fathers have. — 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

... epiphanies rarely repeat themselves. — 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

Hello Kitty will never speak. — Pico Iyer

Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective. — Pico Iyer

I often think we're most happy when we forget the time, — Pico Iyer

Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free. — Pico Iyer

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

[The Dalai Lama] told me some years ago, "I've made every concession to China, and I've been as open and tolerant as I could, and still things get worse in Tibet." If you look at it from one point of view, as he himself says, his monastic position of forbearance and nonviolence hasn't reaped any benefits. And yet, he's thinking in terms of the long term, of centuries. — Pico Iyer

I began thinking about why am I constructing almost a shadow father or ghost father in my head into Graham Greene in response to the father who created me? What's going on here? I think a part of my sense is it's every boy's story. 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. — Pico Iyer

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

We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that's why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool's paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home. — 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

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

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

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred. — Pico Iyer

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

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

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

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them. — 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 were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone. — Pico Iyer

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it "has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult." Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real ... "the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction. — Peter Matthiessen

The less you struggle with a problem, the more it's likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished. — Pico Iyer

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

If Allah has willed it that way ... He must have better plans for you child ... — K. Hari Kumar

Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how far they've come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring - youth - is visible, there's always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else's perhaps too-innocent illusions. — 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

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

Travel is an act of humility — Pico Iyer

Greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down. — Pico Iyer

And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love - our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything - so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk. — Pico Iyer

Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens. — Pico Iyer

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

In winter California became an older place, with secrets.

Nothing more distrusted in California than the impression of settledness.

That's what California is good for - dreaming of other places. — Pico Iyer

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

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

Unlike many spiritual leaders, Dalai Lama is never been in a position to just sit on a mountain top handing out wisdom. He's had to live out his principles in the middle of this very complex situation, every day for sixty years or more. I think it's something that moves many people about his example. — 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

For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people. — Pico Iyer

He [Dalai Lama] feels, and I feel, and everyone feels the suffering and frustration of the Tibetans who long for action, who long for a militant response. But, in some ways very few of those individuals have ever been in the position of being head of state. — Pico Iyer

He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, "We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world." — Pico Iyer

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. — Pico Iyer

Dying is not a solution.. I want to live with You..! — K. Hari Kumar

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

The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of "No worries, mate," while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point. — Pico Iyer

I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event. — 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

In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still. — 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

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

[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

Everything begins when you understand that you, and you above all, are Max Brod: this, for W., is the founding principle. That you (whoever you are) are Max Brod, and everyone else (whoever that might be) is Franz Kafka. Which is to say, you will never understand anyone else and are endlessly guilty before them, and that even with the greatest effort of loyalty, you will betray them at every turn. — Lars Iyer

There is so much to learn from leaves who graciously dance in thunder, rain and storm, in heat and merciless cold, dance to a song of their own indifferent that in time they will curl and die for it is not for them to know but only to dance and be happy. — Meenakshi Iyer

If a book doesn't make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it? — Lars Iyer