It so often happens that somebody says 'change your life' and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.

All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

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 suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life

We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.