Writer Pico Iyer: ‘I think I’d be quite unsettling to my younger self’

Pico Iyer, 62, has written about places including Japan, North Korea, Cuba, Yemen and Easter Island. He is the author of more than a dozen books.

What was your childhood or earliest ambition?
To lead a quiet life in Japan as a writer. It’s one of life’s many surprises that, half a century later, I seem to be doing it. I was drawn to Japan and realised it was an intuition worth following.

Private school or state school? University or straight into work?
Eton, on a King’s Scholarship. I remember distinctly that my parents paid £320 a year, which even then was not a lot of money. I had been at a private school in California and I worked out it was cheaper to go to England and fly back three times a year to see my parents.

Then university — too much university. I did English literature from the age of 17 at Oxford, then fell into the postgraduate thing at Harvard, and spent four years doing that until I escaped.

Who was or still is your mentor?
Graham Greene being such a haunted, fallen, honest, compassionate writer, I always felt he saw me very well, knew me inside out, and gave me a way to navigate the world. I think he would never want to be a mentor and I would only trust a mentor who never wanted to be one. Of course, I never met him, I knew him only through his writing.

My mentors have been places rather than people. It’s Thailand and Cuba and Tibet and Japan that taught me everything I never learnt in school and really shaped my life.

How physically fit are you?
I’m unfit for anything.

Ambition or talent: which matters more to success?
Luck is more important than either. Talent is indispensable — and the discipline to make use of it. Ambition seems to me counter-productive — winning the battle to lose the war.

How politically committed are you?
Not at all. I feel that we change the world by changing ourselves — by changing the way we look at the world. Politics in the public domain has never been my concern.

What would you like to own that you don’t currently possess?
Time.

What’s your biggest extravagance?
Books.

In what place are you happiest?
Ideally, wherever I am. In practice, that means either my desk in our tiny rented apartment in Japan or the Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, where I’ve spent quite a lot of time.

What ambitions do you still have?
To be free of ambition.

What drives you on?
Delight and curiosity. The urge to look around the next corner and to go somewhere, inwardly or externally, I haven’t been before.

What is the greatest achievement of your life so far?
Helping to raise two kids not my own.

What do you find most irritating in other people?
Self-delusion.

If your 20-year-old self could see you now, what would he think?
“Oh no — who is this bald fogey I never want to become?” I think I’d be quite unsettling to my younger self.

Which object that you’ve lost do you wish you still had?
I lost every last thing in a wildfire. I realised I didn’t need 90 per cent of the things that I had. The one thing I miss is my notes — a record of my experience. I now keep my notes in a safety deposit box.

What is the greatest challenge of our time?
Climate change. I think that’s another way of saying we’re so caught up in our tiny screens, we can’t see the larger picture.

Do you believe in an afterlife?
I’m not sure it matters. It’ll come or it won’t, regardless of what I believe.

If you had to rate your satisfaction with your life so far, out of 10, what would you score?
A nine. Or, really, 11. I think if you’d told me when I was a boy that I’d reach retirement age without experiencing poverty, major illness or war, doing what I love, in a country I respect, with a beautiful companion, I wouldn’t have believed you. Such a state of grace can’t last for ever, so I cherish it.

“A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations” by Pico Iyer is published by Bloomsbury

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