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
life nor realm religion tourist yoga
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
appear gone knowing
Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
car gives volumes walks worry
Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.
perhaps technology
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
easily entered entirely japan manhattan moved movies online rural survive till trip
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.
books challenges dark emerson emily questions sentences six souls wisdom
Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.
affinity came crowded lies outside power room somehow stands
The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with.
definition distracted forgot game growing happiness lost moment noticed suppose time whether
I suppose even when I was growing up, I noticed I was most happy when I was absorbed in something, lost in the moment and forgot the time, whether was conversation, movie, or a game I was playing. That was my definition of happiness. And I was least happy when I was all over the place, distracted and restless.
club health neglect readily regularly truly
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.
change literary
A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.
foreigner subject time
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.
block communication lose music nuance shouting subtlety
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.
arrive corporate guaranteed higher knew meant position remain remember
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.
barely desperate devices lives moved seem time trying ways
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.