Pico Iyer Quotes

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

I look for characters that speak to something in me.

In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.

If you're open to it, New Orleans will teach you about yourself, but if you want to hide from who you really are, the city will help you do that, too.

Growing up, nobody I knew even knew a writer. So it was a big adventure and something that I've wrestled with my whole life. I think it's a journey worth taking, really finding out who you are and what you do well.

Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.

Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us.

If I can keep losing myself - and finding parts of myself - in other people's writing and direction, then that's all I can really ask for. That's all I want, to keep losing myself.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

Knowing yourself has to always come from within. The outside can inspire or guide you, but knowing has to come from within you.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I had to examine myself very thoroughly to find the right path personally.

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

I think a lot of Magnum was me.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.

I write in a journal occasionally. But it is not a daily discipline for me.