My father was my mother's home, the one place that she knew she could be safe. It was all a journey of faith for him, and I think he felt like if you don't find more love and understanding at the end of a journey like that, then you are lost - and if you only find hate and resentment, it will destroy you. I believe that.

What I love most about New York is that I can walk in the street and nobody is looking at me as if I'm different. In my country and in Italy, you have to choose sides. I was a famous journalist and I was also an immigrant and ultimately I never stopped feeling like I was a guest.

My father's biggest achievement with us as children was that he taught us that everyone is human and equal, even your enemy has the same needs and wants that you do: understanding, love, inclusion.

I hope there's a window that opens in American television where the rest of the world is viewed in a less censored light. There is something about the world outside the United States that is not understood here - that seems threatening to Americans.

My first memory as a child growing up is of playing in the gardens, the mosque is really a gigantic garden, probably the biggest in all of East Jerusalem. Our house was about 100 meters from the mosque.

I was 16 when my father died, and I had a choice to come back and live in his house or I'd stay at the school. But I felt if my father wanted me to go to that school when I was 5, there must have been a reason - and I understood that reason when I was a teenager, because that school became the only place where I was safe.

My whole childhood was about being in the garden. It wasn't really a religious place to me. The love I felt there... was in contradiction with what I saw in the streets. It was a different world.