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One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move.

I guess, like most foreigners, when you're away, you see your own culture being even more strange. But where I come from and my roots mean a lot. I miss my family and my friends. Something I've realized as I've been traveling is that it's more about the actual people than the actual place.

I've always been really interested in how people's identities are shaped by where they come from and how they want to get away from where they come from.

At first, one believes in love. Then one crosses a border, a border of time. Then that belief, too, is lost.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

The best migrant is the migrant who does not come.

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.