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
Interpretation
Writing should be heartfelt and immediate, akin to personal messages in times of emotional significance.
In this quote, Pico Iyer emphasizes the need for writing to be both spontaneous and sincere, just like a personal letter filled with genuine emotion directed to someone close. He suggests that writing serves as a unique form of communication that expresses intimacy even towards those who are unfamiliar, bridging the gap between the writer and the reader through shared human experiences.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to encourage participants to write from the heart.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
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.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.
All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.
Movie acting is primarily listening. If you're really engaged, that's all a movie audience wants to see is you processing what's happening in your world.
A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
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