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

Home is essentially a set of values you carry around with you and, like a turtle or a snail or whatever, home has to be something that is part of you and can be equally a part of you wherever you are. I think that not having a home is a good inducement to creating a metaphysical home and to being able to see it in more invisible ways.

Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.

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

I began thinking about why am I constructing almost a shadow father or ghost father in my head into Graham Greene in response to the father who created me? What's going on here? I think a part of my sense is it's every boy's story. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with.

The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others.

Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free.