The whole Hollywood conception of Tibet as this peace-loving country denies the complex humanity of the Tibetan people. Their ideas exist in a high degree of tension with impulses toward corruption, toward violence, toward all sorts of things. The Dalai Lama himself would say that he has to fight these impulses himself on a daily basis.

The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there are no fixed identities. He would have thought that someone calling himself a Buddhist has too much invested in calling himself a Buddhist.

I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privileges of free speech in the morally superior West versus pathetic wimps in repressive countries we don't like.

I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history.

The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, they find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be.