Our own country seemed more polarized than it's ever been and since the two terrorist attacks of 9/11, religion was in greater disrepute than at any other time in my lifetime.

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.

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

I think Dalai Lama is always careful about stressing that people be led into the practice by somebody who knows what's going on.

I think America the symbol and America the notion are still very different from America the nation. What's touching and almost regenerative is that whatever is happening in the reality of America, where there is a murder rate worse than Lebanon's and where there is so much homelessness and poverty, still America will be a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free.