Yet [Dalai Lama] has said very strongly that basic freedoms of thought and speech have to be respected in Tibet and they're not at the moment. Tolerance doesn't mean accepting what's unfair.

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.

Yes, we know more than ever before, and it's a wonder that we get to inhabit a world full of driverless cars and 3D printers. But that doesn't mean that we know any more about the essential things in life - love, faith, death - and it would be dangerous to assume we did. The only thing that gets us through sometimes is a proper, humbled sense that we don't have a clue, we can't be sure what's going to happen next and life will always be much larger than our ideas of it.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

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

Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.