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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand.”

“The first time I stepped onto the rooftop of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1985, I felt, as never before or since, as if I was stepping onto the rooftop of my being: onto some dimension of consciousness that I'd never visited before.”

“I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“We can't change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world - and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer.”

“In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don't have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there's a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world.”

“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

“A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.”

“אם יש לכם קצת זמן, כבו את האורות בבית, שבו בחושך והאזינו למוזיקה. אם אתם ממתינים בתור לבנק ויש לכם חמש דקות לא לעשות כלום, אלה יכולות להיות חמש דקות של מיקרו־חופשה.”

“מפגש עם זר מרתק, התעוררות מהמציאות הנוחה שלכם או פשוט תזכורת לכך שיופי לא באמת לוקח אתכם רחוק בחיים, יכולים לקרות גם בזמן שאתם צועדים או נוהגים ליד הבית שלכם.”

“הייתי ממליץ למי שרוצה לחוות את החוויה הכי עשירה ומאושרת בחייו לשכוח מפריז, טהיטי או איזה ספארי ופשוט לנסוע למנזר שתיקה.”