In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.

In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take; that's all you get.

That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.