Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, known as Pico 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...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionWriter
CountryIndia
invisible lucky spend time trains travel
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.
barack borders categories choose dalai leaders living next outside terms
I think of myself as living so much outside borders or old categories that I choose as my leaders U2, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, Sigur Ros, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, and the girl next door. By definition, in short, my leaders are the ones who think in terms larger, and more intimate, than any country.
figure five gain point spend
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?'
cell front house kids stretching thrilled wake
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.
exactly perhaps sounds though
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.
human nature
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.
completed deliver editor months novel quarrel september six west
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.
either forget global goods great nearly people tag takes talk technology terms
'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.
brief communication efficient net pauses taking talk tennis wonderful
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?
allowed annual beat boarding boys dead english horses languages latin october older poems run sunday wrote younger
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.
beauty complete empty gives imagination include music page pause piece reader rest room sentences space
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.
fascinated people perhaps possibilities themselves travel trip written
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.
buddha lives
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.
age flat latest papers sit step time whether
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.