Travel, in the superficial sense at least, is a good cure for loneliness. When you travel, especially in the third world, you quickly find that you get more friends than you know what to do with.

If you'd asked me some years ago, I would have said [Dalai Lama] is an extraordinarily compassionate, clear-sighted, calm human being. But now, I'm more convinced than ever that his political positions as well as his spiritual positions arise out of such precise and realistic thinking that they're extremely sound.

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.

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.

I think America the symbol and America the notion are still very different from America the nation. What's touching and almost regenerative is that whatever is happening in the reality of America, where there is a murder rate worse than Lebanon's and where there is so much homelessness and poverty, still America will be a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free.

We can better see what we don't have. The other man's grass is always greener and now we can actually go and visit his grass much more and feel the absence of green in our own lives.