[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

You cross a border and the policeman or the frontier policeman look at you, What are you doing here? Why are you coming? How long will you stay? Well, if I had nearly enough years, I would write a novel about being a refugee.

Still I believe that Hanna Arendt, she was wrong when she tried to say that we are all actually capable of this, it's not true. I think it's not true. There are certain things human beings are not capable of. I mean people, even normal human beings. You have to do certain things in order to become what the enemy was and I didn't accept her philosophical outlook on that.

I do not deal with the text [of the Bible] scientifically. I read it, I'm interested in its layers of meaning, but my relation to it is much more an emotional one.

I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don't know.

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

One thing is that [Tibetans] should not give up hope. That's - even [if] it lasts a century. My discussions with the Dalai Lama always were about that.