Yes, we know more than ever before, and it's a wonder that we get to inhabit a world full of driverless cars and 3D printers. But that doesn't mean that we know any more about the essential things in life - love, faith, death - and it would be dangerous to assume we did. The only thing that gets us through sometimes is a proper, humbled sense that we don't have a clue, we can't be sure what's going to happen next and life will always be much larger than our ideas of it.

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

We can better see what we don't have. The other man's grass is always greener and now we can actually go and visit his grass much more and feel the absence of green in our own lives.

America has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.

Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.

And it’s only by going nowhere - by sitting still or letting my mind relax - that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

In the past, Ive visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldnt ordinarily explore.