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It's pretty physically unsettling, living life on a visa.

The place of my birth, and residence for nearly sixteen years, in the early part of my life, became endeared to my feelings and affections; and more especially so after I had quitted it for an unknown place, and to associate with strangers.

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

I spent two years living in London - I'd have stayed for ever if I could have got a work visa. It was there I started collecting vinyl and fell in love with the sounds of the 1970s.

The first 13 years of my life, I lived in China. My parents were missionaries there, and I was an only child. Often I felt lonely and out of place. Writing for me became my private place, where no one could come.

I'm always intrigued when you are travelling through a place and there is somebody who has lived there and done the same job for years.

I did have a very restricted, regimented life. There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders.

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.