Pico Iyer Quotes

I've got a different life. I live up on a farm; I don't have anything to do with social media.

At the risk of being a fuddy-duddy I don't have a computer; I don't have e-mail; and I really don't need something in my house that I would be sitting in front of for hours.

I'm actually a bit of a technophobe, which surprises people. I like to stay unplugged as much as possible.

I'm one of those weird people who doesn't even own a computer.

When I was in high school I moved from the big city to a tiny village of 500 people in Vermont. It was like The Waltons!

I want to get a farm where I am going to live for the rest of my life. I like the idea of a secluded place.

Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

I've never been the type of guy that's ever needed a lot of things or any fancy things, but my lifelong goal has always been to have a piece of land and a house.

I grew up in a house with no running water, 16 miles from the closest place that had a post office. I had a very parochial view of the world.

I don't tweet, Twitter, email, Facebook, look book, no kind of book. I have a land line phone at my home - that's the only phone I have. If my phone rang every day like everyone else around me, I would lose my mind.

I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.

The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.

When my mother was raising me, she moved us upstate to the Woodstock area. Our closest neighbor was a mile away. She planted all her own vegetables.

I'm remote from most technology to the point that I'm kind of Amish.

I don't go to movies, I don't own a television, I don't buy magazines and I try not to receive mail, so I'm not really aware of popular culture.

I don't watch TV. I don't use a computer, a fax or a cellphone.

I was brought up in a very open, rural countryside in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones. If your lights went out, you were lit by candlelight for a good four days before they can get to you. And so, my imagination was crazy.

I know people who have, until recently, lived with dirt floors. There are people who live way back off the grid, without electricity. Not a whole lot, but quite a few. That's a choice for a lot of them. There might be a religious element in their isolation, at least with some of them.

I have quit chewing tobacco and don't touch any lager beer, and I don't speak to the girls at all. I am getting to be a perfect hermit; my fiddle, my dog, and my gun I almost worship.

I'm not really out in the world all that much. I mean, I live with no phone signal, in the hills surrounded by trees, and I have, like, a mom and two baby deer that come by all the time, and my dogs and the squirrels are in a full-on feud every morning.

I joke that I'm in the market for a cabin in the woods, and, at some point, I won't be joking anymore.

When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.

We're very tech light in our house.

Throw the computer away and don't look on the internet. That's the best thing to do.