Travel, in the superficial sense at least, is a good cure for loneliness. When you travel, especially in the third world, you quickly find that you get more friends than you know what to do with.
Pico IyerFor if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you canโt quite speak the language, and you donโt know where youโre going, and youโre pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where youโre left puzzling over who you are and whom youโve fallen in love with.
Pico IyerI think people like me are in a relatively privileged position because we have to some extent chosen to live in foreign places. I would always make the distinction between those who are exiles in terms of being thrown out of the place they want to be, and others who are exiles in terms of going toward a place they would rather be.
Pico IyerI like California because it still has the glamour and romanticism and exoticism of a very foreign place. It was the place that when I was young, I was raised on "I Love Lucy" and listening to the Grateful Dead and reading Jack Kerouac. They, to me, were all symbols of this very foreign sense of promise and movement. After all this time here I'm glad I still have it.
Pico Iyer