Pico iyer biography channel
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Q: This is an eccentric book, and I’m not sure what readers will make of it.
A: That’s not so terrible; one of the things I tried very hard to do here was create a weird, hybrid form of sorts, in which you never know what’s going to happen next—or who exactly is going to be the subject. A very full biography of Graham Greene, 2200 pages long, has already been written; novel after memoir after romance has been published by those who knew him and those who didn’t, yet feel haunted by him. The world has no need of another straight book on “Following Graham Greene” or evoking his personality.
But I hoped there might be room for a book that hovers unexpectedly somewhere between autobiography and biography, and tries to see how much what I say about Greene may really be about me, or vice versa; and a book that cuts back and forth between fairly quiet and private introspection and scenes of tumult in the world (which is just the back-and-forth I see and love in Greene). A year before I
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Pico Iyer on What We Can Learn From the Monastic Life
The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty—what deepens and extends it—is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn’t outside the world, but hidden at its very heart.
In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them; in silence, all the unmet strangers across the property come to feel like friends, joined at the root. When we pass one another on the road, we say very little, but it’s all we don’t say that we share.
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Coming out one afternoon into the singing stillness, I pass a woman, tall and blond, looking like she might be from the twenty‑fifth‑floor o
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‘Letting the Work Create You’: A Conversation with Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer: An optimist, as sure-footed in his personal path as in his travel writing. A man who resides on two continents, spending half of each year in California nära his aging mother and the other half living in Japan with his wife and their family. A prolific journalist and author who recently published two books interpreting Japanese culture, now in the midst of several writing projects that promise to take us further into the keen mind and wandering spirit of Pico Iyer.
Iyer is the author of more than a dozen books, translated into twenty-three languages. A British-born travel writer and essayist for TIME since 1986, Iyer is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, Granta and more than 200 other newspapers and magazines worldwide. His two most recent books are Autumn Light: A årstid of Fire and Farewells, and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Ob