Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Well
Everywhere
Country
Hold
Translates
Kind
Imagination
Imaginations
Think
Stills
Immigrant
Thinking
Doe
Partly
World
America
Translate
Still
Immigrants
Wells
Innocence

More quotes by Pico Iyer

Image
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
Image
I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life
Pico Iyer
Image
I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.
Pico Iyer
Image
[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that.
Pico Iyer
Image
So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
Pico Iyer
Image
Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
Anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life.
Pico Iyer
Image
Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially.
Pico Iyer
Image
More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
Pico Iyer
Image
He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world.
Pico Iyer
Image
I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?
Pico Iyer
Image
He [Dalai Lama] feels, and I feel, and everyone feels the suffering and frustration of the Tibetans who long for action, who long for a militant response. But, in some ways very few of those individuals have ever been in the position of being head of state.
Pico Iyer
Image
In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.
Pico Iyer
Image
I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality, and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment.
Pico Iyer
Image
I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.
Pico Iyer