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You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.

My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

I miss my family, and I like being a tourist when I go back.