290 Quotes by Pico Iyer

As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn’t matter where or how far you go – the farther commonly the worse – the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. – Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz.

The more we run from a problem, the more we’re actually running into it.

When love is a commodity, you wonder why anyone’s giving it away for free. Or what the hidden costs might be.

To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

There’s one problem with California.” I wasn’t eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. “It has no understanding of evil.

Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year – or at least forty-five hours – and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.

Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.