Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

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.

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.

Dalai Lama is taking a subtle and nuanced view of politics and he is thinking in terms of events well beyond our lifetime.

I think Dalai Lama efforts have been heroic.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.