A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

Nothing makes me feel better -- calmer, clearer and happier -- than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.

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.

I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.

I think Dalai Lama's efforts have been heroic.

American Dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

Unlike many spiritual leaders, Dalai Lama is never been in a position to just sit on a mountain top handing out wisdom. He's had to live out his principles in the middle of this very complex situation, every day for sixty years or more. I think it's something that moves many people about his example.

And it's only by going nowhere -- by sitting still or letting my mind relax -- that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

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

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others.

The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong.

Most of us who have been lucky enough to hear, read and see the Dalai Lama, often come away thinking, What a kind, inspiring and golden human being! That is true, but I think it does him an injustice.

I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads -- in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation -- that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind.

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.

Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.

We travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.