Pico Iyer Quotes

Through travel, you discover a new aspect to your personality. You discover things which you wouldn't seated in the confines of your home.

I've already done things I never believed I would. Even stepping out of Northampton and being in London - London always seemed like the big city I might go to for Carnival, go for a party and a chill and then head home.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

Alabama will always be home and have a special place in my heart, but I want my life to be more than just living there. I want to see more of the world and, through that, find out more about myself.

New situations inspire new thoughts. Here is the benefit of travelling, much more than in mere sight-seeing. We lose ourselves in the streets of our own city, and go abroad to find ourselves.

I am willing to move out of my comfort zone and experience life in a new way.

Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.

Try to find pleasure in the speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

I know where I'm going to be, I'm not traveling here and there and everywhere. That didn't necessarily prompt me to it but it definitely opened up my mind of saying okay, maybe this is a good time to do this.

When you go from one place to another, you go with experience, you don't go with prescriptions.

I left Jamaica for a while, because as an artist I need to experience different things, see the world, have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

I'm attracted to seeing how different I can be, pushing the boat out.

I don't know what the future holds. I just try to do roles that I haven't done before.

You don't have to travel, but I find extended travel to be a helpful tool for reexamining yourself and the constraints you've artificially placed on your life. It's easy to believe everything has to be done one way if you're always in one place around the same people.

Very often, human beings are living like on autopilot, reacting automatically with what happens. What interests me about the life of an explorer is you are in the unknown; you are out of your habits.

A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without his familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.

It's good for you to go somewhere that you wouldn't normally go.

And I think I often choose to do something because it's quite different from what I've done before.

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

Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

For 35 years, I've said, 'I'll never go solo.' But after a period of time - and this isn't just for an artist, but for anybody - all the things you never wanted to do eventually become the only things left that you haven't done. So they start looking pretty interesting.