A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.
Interpretation
This quote compares a writer to a fortune teller who interprets the world around them.
Pico Iyer's quote suggests that a writer possesses a unique ability to observe and interpret the deeper meanings of life and existence, much like a palmist interprets the lines on a person's palm. Through their words, writers capture the essence of human experiences and the world itself, imparting wisdom and insights that resonate with readers.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, to inspire participants to observe the world around them more deeply.
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.
You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.
For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.
In Hollywood, there is one dominant voice. It is a white, male, straight gaze. When I talk about positive portrayals of black people and women, I'm saying complexity. I'm not saying goody-two-shoes, everything's okay. No. The positive view of me is to see me as I am: the 'good,' the 'bad,' the gray. That is a positive portrayal.
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
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