My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

I think Dalai Lama is always careful about stressing that people be led into the practice by somebody who knows what's going on.

As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.

The more internationalism there is in the world, the more nationalism there will always be, as people feel scared of the Other streaming into their neighbourhood and don't always know where to lay their foundations in a world on the move.

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

A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

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.