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.

Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.

I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school. I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag.

More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences; religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.