Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer’s most recent books include The Art of Stillness and The Man Within My Head.

Out of the Cell

‘I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything I habitually walked – or sleep-walked – past.’

‘The writer on place has to go further inward, into the realm of silence and nuance and personal enquiry.’

‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’

‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’

‘The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity.’