Pico Iyer Quotes

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we're required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection. I believe that we need to slow down.

There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.

I like to get off my phone because when I sit with my phone, I don't feel creative cos I'm just sitting reading other people's things.

Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.

I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life.

We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren't with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we're sending out into the cybersphere.

In the kind of fast-food world that we live in, where everything's so fast paced and it's, 'Look over here! Look over there,' we don't really take the time to sit down and enjoy music - or anything else, for that matter.

I'm very tech-forward. However, I also think hitting the pause button is not a bad thing, and really connecting with people one-to-one viscerally, having a connection with someone, is really important.

In this world, where everything happens so fast, it's hard to sit back, take the time and contemplate.

Social media is great, I guess, but it feels like technology is the sapper of innocence.

There's no down time any more.

Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.

Everything goes by so fast that if you want to be a part of it, you need to go that fast. But because you go that fast, you don't lead the life you should lead.

I can live without endless television programmes and films just centered around computers. I can sort of live without that.

In America everyone's fast.

In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find.

We like things to happen very quickly; it’s our lifestyle.

Technology is cool, but you've got to use it as opposed to letting it use you.

If you're constantly stimulated by being called away to the buzzing and the excitement of what's on your phone, solitude seems kind of scary.

I'm not one of those guys who walks around with a flip phone who doesn't want to be connected. There are times when I'm tech-friendly, and there are times when I personally do want to shut everything off because I'm more creative when I shut off.

In life, you are struck by the importance of presence, of the small moments of meaning, the miracle of your child's breath, the feelings of deep human connection. When you are thinking about technology, your mind is not on all of that.

I don't think its good for the soul to invest too much of yourself in technology.

We're all drowning in data. We all need moments of recovery. For me, that includes not going right to my phone when I wake up in the morning.