“To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to culti…” — John Burdett

In the West, we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking.

I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.

The world other than as advertised can be an amazing place.

I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don't think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris - or Bangkok?