Pico Iyer Quotes

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Sometimes it's the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

The older you get the more you understand what you're doing.

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

All my work is always that exploration of human nature.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

All confessions are Odysseys.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Sometimes you don't understand what you're going through until you're on the other side of it.