The Man Within My Head Quotes

“...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man Within My Head

“Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?”
― Pico Iyer, The Man Within My Head

“If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it’s easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer—or a spy; you’ve always got, analytically, a ticket out.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“There’s one problem with California.” I wasn’t eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. “It has no understanding of evil.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“You’re not writing a biography?” Mike now asked. “Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don’t think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can’t be sure of a thing.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“I’d turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it’s harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how far they’ve come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring—youth—is visible, there’s always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else’s perhaps too-innocent illusions.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“A son may choose never to listen to a father, but a father, as Greene saw as well as anyone, is always bound to a son, and real disinheritance is hard. Another advantage virtual fathers have.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“It wasn’t the country, the girl, the teacher who let us down; it was our judgment, and whatever led us to expect too much of the country, the girl or the teacher in the first place. That was why it became harder and harder to condemn anyone: wouldn’t God himself, faced with a wounded murderer, feel somewhat at a loss?”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“Reality seemed so paltry next to castles—dungeons—in the air.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“there was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.” He”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head

“told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama’s teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we’d read at school, from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man within My Head