Explore Quotes by Pico Iyer

'Globalization' has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it's nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology - either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.

A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours - one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark.

Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.

I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life

In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

In an age of speed, I began to think nothing could be more exhilarating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger

Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?

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

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.

And it’s only by going nowhere - by sitting still or letting my mind relax - that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in.

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.