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I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Likes
Took
Comfortable
Alone
Community
Always
People
Perverse

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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To this day, at my relatively advanced age, I still don't have a place I can really call home. I've never bought property. I just move between temporary base camps. I know that the very notion of home, of having a family or community, is a hard one for me to embrace.
Pico Iyer
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I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.
Pico Iyer
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For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.
Pico Iyer
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The Dalai Lama says don't pray for peace, don't wait for peace, don't talk about peace - do it right now.
Pico Iyer
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In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.
Pico Iyer
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The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic.
Pico Iyer
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I think people's minds are going to have to assimilate in the sense that all the world is international now. The whole world has gone global. I think cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are the models of our future.
Pico Iyer
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Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.
Pico Iyer
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Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
Pico Iyer
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I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life
Pico Iyer
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Our own country seemed more polarized than it's ever been and since the two terrorist attacks of 9/11, religion was in greater disrepute than at any other time in my lifetime.
Pico Iyer
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I think people like me are in a relatively privileged position because we have to some extent chosen to live in foreign places. I would always make the distinction between those who are exiles in terms of being thrown out of the place they want to be, and others who are exiles in terms of going toward a place they would rather be.
Pico Iyer
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When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.
Pico Iyer
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Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.
Pico Iyer
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For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with.
Pico Iyer
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As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.
Pico Iyer
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I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind.
Pico Iyer
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None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.
Pico Iyer
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I like the way that American has become a kind of spiritual home even for people who have never seen it. American dreams are strongest of all in the hearts of people who have only seen America in their dreams. I think it's refreshing and reviving to go around the world and see how America still occupies this special place.
Pico Iyer
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America has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.
Pico Iyer