Quotes from Pico Iyer

Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around — a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise.

And it's only by going nowhere- by sitting still or letting my mind relax- that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

If they can't get to Europe, they'll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as "inauthentic," they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.

You don't get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.

Screens in a Zen meditation place are pulled back at dusk, to let the mosquitoes in. · A monastery, for St. Benedict, was "a school for charity." A Zen temple might be called a school for clarity. The challenge in either tradition is to see how one leads to the other.

how every character is effectively a tiny figure in a suffocating world of associations and obligations; where many an American novel might send its protagonist out into the world to make his own destiny, in S?suke's Japan he cannot move for all his competing (and unmeetable) responsibilities to his aunt, his younger brother, his wife, and society itself.

What avails monastic aspirations when, as Mark had said, religious geniuses were born and not made? Could not renouncing the world be a form of self-indulgence? Was not monasticism, in the end, as much an act of cowardice as courage?

S?seki is an unusually intimate writer— the public world is only his concern by implication— and in Japan (again as in the England that I know) intimacy is shown not by all that you can say to someone else, but by all that you don't need to say.

This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one's problems, which shouldn't be theirs; it's one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home.

If you think, 'I breathe,' " said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, "the 'I' is extra.

But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us.

Yes, I love that word "absorption" because I think that's my definition of happiness. I think all of us know we are happiest when we forget ourselves, when we forget the time, when we lose ourselves in a beautiful piece of music or a movie or a deep conversation with a friend or an intimate encounter with someone we love. That's our definition of happiness.

To do what I want, and not to do what I won't - this is why I entered such a life.

I'd turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it's harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world.

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

You're not writing a biography?" Mike now asked. "Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don't think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I'm interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.

It wasn't the country, the girl, the teacher who let us down; it was our judgment, and whatever led us to expect too much of the country, the girl or the teacher in the first place. That was why it became harder and harder to condemn anyone: wouldn't God himself, faced with a wounded murderer, feel somewhat at a loss?

A son may choose never to listen to a father, but a father, as Greene saw as well as anyone, is always bound to a son, and real disinheritance is hard. Another advantage virtual fathers have.

In winter California became an older place, with secrets. Nothing more distrusted in California than the impression of settledness. That's what California is good for - dreaming of other places.

Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how far they've come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring—youth—is visible, there's always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else's perhaps too-innocent illusions.

Going nowhere was the grand adventure that made sense of everywhere else.

Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the world and everyone in it.

there was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim." He