I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.

Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.

I think that America is an ideal place for the privileged homeless, who are used to different cultures. It's easiest and most accommodating because it is a country of exiles and immigrants and newcomers. There are no walls, in that sense. There is always the sense that traditions are being made as we speak. So you can slot yourself in. If you are living at a distance in society, this is one of the most congenial societies to live in.

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.

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.

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.