Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
Interpretation
Writing should be heartfelt and immediate, akin to personal messages in times of emotional significance.
In this quote, Pico Iyer emphasizes the need for writing to be both spontaneous and sincere, just like a personal letter filled with genuine emotion directed to someone close. He suggests that writing serves as a unique form of communication that expresses intimacy even towards those who are unfamiliar, bridging the gap between the writer and the reader through shared human experiences.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to encourage participants to write from the heart.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
The crown of literature is poetry.
Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.
A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
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