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
book heart glasses
What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.
spiritual moving thinking
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.
like-love wonder midst
All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
lonely loneliness people
So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.
choices mind small-moments
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?
meditation helping dalai
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.
opposites sometimes making-a-living
Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.
war men world
I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?
travel falling-in-love taken
We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
two issues sight
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.
lying thinking giving
I love the fact that we can't explain coincidences. I think it's like sometimes you walk into a crowded room and you'll see a stranger and you feel as if you know her better than the friends that you came with. And the very fact that you can't explain it is what gives it its power, that it lies in some deeper or mysterious realm, I think.
writing parent anomalies
Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
home born happens
Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.
movement transformation committed
A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.