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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
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Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do.
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Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.
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Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
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I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
I think the world is always going to be as diverse as it always has been.
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Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer.
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Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds.
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It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day.
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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.