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.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Mr. Trump doesn't radiate many of the qualities I respect. But what do I know? I've never met Trump. I know he's savvy enough to change his tune according to his audience and I don't know very much at all about how government works.

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

The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.

Dalai Lama is transforming those criteria - and the whole way of conducting politics. He's conducting politics in a much deeper way than most politicians are able to. He's the only politician I know of who's a monk. The Pope, of course, is in a similar position, but the Pope isn't in the same way leading a country of many million people.

What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century.