Pico Iyer Quotes

I love my father, but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on.

I knew Henry Fonda was my father, but I didn't know who I was. They all thought of me as Henry Fonda's son. Unfortunately for them, they never got to know me.

The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world.

I mean my mother always wanted us to be individuals. She always instilled that into our brains which was incredibly painful for an adolescent to deal with.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

It's okay to grow up, it's just slowing down that's the scary part. Running out of time. It's okay to grow up, but it doesn't mean you have to become like your parents.

When you're growing up you need your parents, but you don't want to be associated with them because you're trying to have your own life.

At some point, in order to gain his identity, the kid goes "I'm not my dad" or "I'm not my mom."

I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life. And perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree. I was looking for - when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I went to work.

I was kind of smart enough when I was young, 14 or 15 years old, to realize that if you're ever going to do anything and step out of the shadow of your own dad - not only in hockey, but in life itself - you're going to have to learn you're Brett and not 'Bobby's son.'

When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.

My dad is a civil engineer, and my mom is a stay-at-home mom. The fact that my parents weren't really involved in music was kind of good, because it meant that I had something that was private and personal.

I have done everything I can to make sure my daughter knows her father because you form your own identity by rebelling against your parents - but first you have to know them.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

I think I look more like me than my father's daughter now.

People often ask me when I realised that I was different. Some people seem surprised that it's a question that I cannot answer. I was never told that I was different. I was always just Sinead; I was just like my dad.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

I attempt to be who I am and it's fun. At the same time, growing up doing what I'm doing can be a little crazy.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

Meg, when people don't know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named

What I know for sure: Often we don't even realize who we're meant to be because we're so busy trying to live out someone else's ideas. But other people and their opinions hold no power in defining our destiny.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

Being myself didn't work. Being someone else didn't work. Maybe I just wasn't meant to have friends.