Pico Iyer Quotes

The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

I want to get within myself and write. I really, really want to write.

I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.

Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.

You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.

I'm interested in trying to explore what I think is the truth at a given time in my life, and part of the process of being honest is - in my mind - talking about the idea that you're watching a movie. You're sitting here watching a movie. And I like that. It appeals to me intellectually, and also in a way I can't even explain.

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

I really liked the idea of creating a journal myself. It's like the way I clear my throat. I write a page every day, maybe 500 words. It could be about something I'm specifically worried about in the new novel; it could be a question I want answered; it could be something that's going on in my personal life. I just use it as an exercise.

There were always moments where I'd say, 'What else can I do with my life?' But when I was 30 years old and discovered I could write - I wrote 'Black Cloud' in six weeks - it opened up a whole new world for me.

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

I am always writing to myself.

I feel my writing comes from a desire to... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect.

I didn't know I was gonna be a writer when I started out.

The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.