Pico Iyer Quotes

My earliest memory of freedom was when I was about 14 and I stopped caring what people thought about me! I was so free and in charge! That whole year I was exploring myself, and I was so 'free' that I got sent away to boarding school.

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

During my 'difficult teens,' I read about worlds that were mysterious.

I'm not interested in who am I. I'm interested in what's gone, the disinheritance, what I've been able to become or learn or fuse with or not fuse with. A certain freedom comes... I like it that way.

When I was a teenager, I felt my life was constrained by rules, school, my parents. I wanted to feel like I was empowered and different; that's why superheroes, comics, manga, and video games filled my needs. When I got older, I realized power is not free; it comes with responsibility.

I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.

When I sing I don't feel like it's me. I feel I am fabulous, like I'm 10 feet tall. I am the greatest. I am the strongest. I am Samson. I'm whoever I want to be.

For me, stories were brothers, sisters and friends, filling the long hours between childhood and adolescence, holding up a true mirror in which I might find out who I was rather than a distorted reflection of who I was expected to become.

'Born to Run' was a mixture of things but mostly about youth and fantasies.

Growing up, 'Cosmo' was my lifeline to the world. A world that I wanted to be in but couldn't get to yet.

Before my transition I felt trapped, and now I've been set free.

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping. They were becoming. They were.

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

…find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us, but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.

After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.

What if you could be anything, or anybody, you chose to be? Think about it. What would you choose to be?

I find it somewhat liberating to jump, to dive into things that are the opposite of me.

I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.

I actually was rebelling as all young adults tend to do at or around the age of 19, to experiment with their lives and have fun.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.

A flapper is just a little girl trying to grow up - in the process of growing up.