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

Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.

The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.

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

Because I don't belong entirely to Britain or the U.S. or India or Japan, I build my foundations in some way deeper than mere passports, and more in the light of where I'm going than of "where I come from."

For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.