Quotes by Pico Iyer

I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own... it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)

...is therefore an ideal place because I never will be a true citizen here, and will always be an outsider, however long I live here and however well I speak the language. And the society around me is as comfortable with that as I am… I am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go; my home is both invisible and portable. But I would gladly stay in this physical location for the rest of my life, and there is nothing in life that I want that it doesn’t have.

Paul Theroux is very good in suggesting that there is a dishonesty in claiming we don’t have judgments. We all make very unfair judgments about the places we go...and that’s part of the process of how a dialogue begins and evolves. And I think I have one small advantage over some people, which is that when I am traveling around Asia, looking at how it took in western stuff, I am partly an Asian and partly Western, so I can claim a small acquaintance with both sides of the dialogue.

And at a relatively early stage I probably realized intuitively that when it came to settling down or being part of a family or a community, I was not very well-prepared. But the compensation was that there were other things for which my background had equipped me quite well.  So, if you set me down in Rwanda tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t be culture shocked and I would probably feel no more estranged than I do in India, England or America. So I think, yeah, in that sense, my upbringing schooled me, I suppose, in expatriation and in outsidership, which is to say in writing, in a way, certainly in observation, because everywhere I was, whether it was in England or California or India, it was a foreign place to me.

The person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.