Pico Iyer

“Paradise is not a place, but a state of mind.”

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”

“And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.”

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.”

“Travel is not a matter of trying to see the world, but of trying to see it new.”

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

“Home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It's the place where you stand.”

“A person susceptible to 'wanderlust' is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.”

“Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because all of your senses are turned up to the setting marked 'on.'”

“Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.”

“Writing, in the end, is a way of processing the world, and of not being held hostage by it.”

“In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.”

“For me, the most alive moment comes when I am not in control, when I have to surrender to the situation.”

“A traveler is a creature of the future, if only because he is not a creature of the past.”

“So much of our lives is given over to the future that I can't think of anything more liberating than trying to be present.”

“Stillness is not the absence of movement, but the calming of the soul.”

“The best way to know a place is to live it, to be of it, to eat with it, to walk with it.”

“To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a place you don't know.”