Pico Iyer Quotes

I like to absorb the atmosphere and explore wherever I'm working or visiting, so I can't say there's any type of place I don't like. When you travel you have to be open to new experiences.

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

I love to travel. I'm a curious person.

If somebody asked me about my inspiration I would say that it's not the peopleand it's not the things, it's travel and experiencing different environments.

Despite having seen a fair amount of the world, I still love travelling - I just have an insatiable curiosity and like looking out of a window.

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.

Everything I've ever done has been because of travel. Right from leaving Australia to where I am today - it's all been about exchanging different points of view. The most important lesson I've learnt is to look and listen to what's happening around you.

It's a business driven by curiosity. If you don't want to go out and learn about the world and see the place, it's the wrong business. But if you do... I've had an unbelievable front row seat.

I have a house, I try to spend as little time in it as possible. Not always easy on the mind and body, but it's how I got myself to 80-plus countries. This kind of routine forces one to reinvent and improvise. The older I get, the more important this is to me.

The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.

Traveling is no fool's errand to him who carries his eyes and itinerary along with him.

Surprising and interesting things happen to those who keep their eyes and their minds open and alert!

Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what's right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

I have been very fortunate to be a part of tours with other artists that have exposed me to new places that I've never been before. Once you discover something beautiful, you just want to keep coming back.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

We all become great explorers during our first few days in a new city, or a new love affair.

I read a lot of highly unsuitable books for an 11-year-old. I was desperate to read as widely as possible. I thought, 'There are so many places I am never going to get the chance to visit, but I can if I read them.' And I did. I could go anywhere in the world - and off it - by reading.

I did some traveling as an amateur and always loved the different places I saw.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

Uncertainty is a very good thing: it's the beginning of an investigation, and the investigation should never end.