Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.

For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.

All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady, to be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together and they would not trust or want to listen to one another. But each is a piece of a stained-glass whole, without which I wouldn’t make sense to myself or to the world outside.

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

Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet.

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