I think [Dalai Lama]is far and away the most solid, deep-thinking, far-sighted politician I've met, and I've been a journalist for 26 years for Time magazine, so I've met a lot of politicians.

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

That's the great advantage of being a foreigner: you're not paying your dues, but you are getting all the benefits.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.