Latest Pico Iyer Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.

  Pico Iyer

  Matter, Stuff, Forget

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Yes, we know more than ever before, and it's a wonder that we get to inhabit a world full of driverless cars and 3D printers. But that doesn't mean that we know any more about the essential things in life - love, faith, death - and it would be dangerous to assume we did. The only thing that gets us through sometimes is a proper, humbled sense that we don't have a clue, we can't be sure what's going to happen next and life will always be much larger than our ideas of it.

  Pico Iyer

  Mean, Love Life, Ideas

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• In terms of technology and science, tomorrow does know more than yesterday; but when it comes to emotions, living with uncertainty, terror, I'm not sure we know any more than Shakespeare did, or the Buddha. And the power of new things - the iPhone or Facebook - is so strong and intoxicating that we sometimes forget that none of them can fundamentally change our relation to ourselves and to what matters.

  Pico Iyer

  Strong, Technology, Yesterday

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• We may be joined these days more by the questions we have in common than by the answers we share.

  Pico Iyer

  May, Answers, Common

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially.

  Pico Iyer

  Grandmother, Land, Numbers

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Because I don't belong entirely to Britain or the U.S. or India or Japan, I build my foundations in some way deeper than mere passports, and more in the light of where I'm going than of "where I come from."

  Pico Iyer

  Light, Japan, Way

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• From the beginning, I've stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I've always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I'm never far away from, in the monastery to which I've been returning for 25 years.

  Pico Iyer

  Mother, Song, Lying

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The more internationalism there is in the world, the more nationalism there will always be, as people feel scared of the Other streaming into their neighbourhood and don't always know where to lay their foundations in a world on the move.

  Pico Iyer

  Moving, People, World

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Mr. Trump doesn't radiate many of the qualities I respect. But what do I know? I've never met Trump. I know he's savvy enough to change his tune according to his audience and I don't know very much at all about how government works.

  Pico Iyer

  Government, Quality, Tunes

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• As a member of the mainstream media for many years, I've learned just one thing: never to trust anything I read in the mainstream media - not because of any agenda or deliberate dissimulation, but simply because it's filtered and comes very often from someone whose judgment I might not trust in other circumstances.

  Pico Iyer

  Media, Years, Agendas

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I think people's minds are going to have to assimilate in the sense that all the world is international now. The whole world has gone global. I think cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are the models of our future.

  Pico Iyer

  Thinking, San Francisco, Cities

  Source: scottlondon.com

• One of the interesting things about Los Angeles is that it's still supplying the whole of the world with its dreams through movies and songs and TV - often of an all-American family at the same time as the real Los Angeles is peopled by souls from Vietnam, Guatemala, and Korea who look nothing like the images being beamed out. I think all that is going to have to change and illusion is going to have to catch up with reality in that regard.

  Pico Iyer

  Dream, Song, Real

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I like California because it still has the glamour and romanticism and exoticism of a very foreign place. It was the place that when I was young, I was raised on "I Love Lucy" and listening to the Grateful Dead and reading Jack Kerouac. They, to me, were all symbols of this very foreign sense of promise and movement. After all this time here I'm glad I still have it.

  Pico Iyer

  Reading, Grateful, California

  Source: scottlondon.com

• What is fascinating about a place like Los Angeles airport is that it is lots and lots of people, many of whom have saved up all their lives and channeled all of their energies toward coming to the promised land of abundance and plenty - the American Dream. But as soon as they arrive here they get a crash course in the American reality.

  Pico Iyer

  Dream, Reality, Airports

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

  Pico Iyer

  Thinking, Years, California

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I think people like me are in a relatively privileged position because we have to some extent chosen to live in foreign places. I would always make the distinction between those who are exiles in terms of being thrown out of the place they want to be, and others who are exiles in terms of going toward a place they would rather be.

  Pico Iyer

  Thinking, People, Want

  Source: scottlondon.com

• The reason I love travel is not just because it transports you in every sense, but because it confronts you with emotional and moral challenges that you would never have to confront at home. So I like going out in search of moral and emotional adventure which throws me back upon myself and forces me to reconsider my assumptions and the things I took for granted. It sends me back a different person.

  Pico Iyer

  Adventure, Home, Emotional

  Source: scottlondon.com

• Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.

  Pico Iyer

  Morning, Wild Places, Safe

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I like the way that American has become a kind of spiritual home even for people who have never seen it. American dreams are strongest of all in the hearts of people who have only seen America in their dreams. I think it's refreshing and reviving to go around the world and see how America still occupies this special place.

  Pico Iyer

  Spiritual, Dream, Home

  Source: scottlondon.com

• America has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.

  Pico Iyer

  Country, Thinking, America

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I think America the symbol and America the notion are still very different from America the nation. What's touching and almost regenerative is that whatever is happening in the reality of America, where there is a murder rate worse than Lebanon's and where there is so much homelessness and poverty, still America will be a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free.

  Pico Iyer

  Reality, Thinking, America

  Source: scottlondon.com

• Travel, in the superficial sense at least, is a good cure for loneliness. When you travel, especially in the third world, you quickly find that you get more friends than you know what to do with.

  Pico Iyer

  Loneliness, World, Superficial

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.

  Pico Iyer

  People, Community, Likes

  Source: scottlondon.com

• That's the great advantage of being a foreigner: you're not paying your dues, but you are getting all the benefits.

  Pico Iyer

  Benefits, Advantage, Foreigners

  Source: scottlondon.com

• Living here in California, I think one of the scariest things about California is the fact that it is rewriting its script and changing constantly and so many people don't know who they will be and who they will be with a year from now.

  Pico Iyer

  Thinking, Years, California

  Source: scottlondon.com