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

America has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.

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.

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

I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.

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.

When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.