We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.

We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.

With movement, families get split. With the politicization of religion, spirituality gets diluted. With people intermarrying and falling in love outside of pre-existing defined groups, the tribe is disappearing. I'm not in favor of going back to those things, but you can't take those things away without putting something new in its place. So finding a way to make transience more acceptable, even beautiful is key.

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.