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.

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

Movement is a fantastic privilege but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.

I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.

I think that mass communications as well as mass travel have made the whole world available to us in ways that they haven't been. As with any kind of freedom, the more of it that one has the greater the need for limit and restraint. But I think that it's a nice challenge to be saddled with.