I like California because it still has the glamour and romanticism and exoticism of a very foreign place. It was the place that when I was young, I was raised on "I Love Lucy" and listening to the Grateful Dead and reading Jack Kerouac. They, to me, were all symbols of this very foreign sense of promise and movement. After all this time here I'm glad I still have it.

I would now put all my heart with the Tibetan people and the Tibetan cause, but not at the expense of the Chinese, and not say that Tibetans are good and Chinese are bad. And in my own life, I hope I would learn to be a little less full of right and wrongs, and a little more able to see everything as a potential right.

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in.

As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.

As a member of the mainstream media for many years, I've learned just one thing: never to trust anything I read in the mainstream media - not because of any agenda or deliberate dissimulation, but simply because it's filtered and comes very often from someone whose judgment I might not trust in other circumstances.

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

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.