Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees then names the streets after them.
The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs the final battleground of the American dream where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It's very romantic in that way but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work.
In the traditional urban novel there is only survival or not. The suburban idea the conformist idea that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
It's interesting now that basically a CG set is the same cost as a real set. So like if you're going to build a CG house in the suburbs it costs you $200 000. And if you were going to build it in a computer it'll cost you $200 000. It's the same... the relationship is exactly the same.
Sydney in general is eclectic. You can be on that brilliant blue ocean walk in the morning and then within 20 minutes you can be in a completely vast suburban sprawl or an Italian or Asian suburb and it's that mix of people it's that melting pot of people that give it its vital personality.
The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.
Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat sleep read watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.
I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about because this was the new world that was emerging.
The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast conforming suburb of the soul.
I'm from a nice suburban middle-class family but my tattoos remind me where I've been.
What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.
'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
I hate these platforms that are all over the place today they are all about grabbing attention. They are suburban! I never do a platform. Well I did in the 1970s but that was a bad experience.
'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death.
My dad worked two jobs and moved us to the suburbs and just being a black person I went through a lot of racism and being called names and being bullied every single day. And it was hard. I didn't have any friends.
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one particularly if he plays golf.
I was trying to break out of the suburbs and when I did break out I don't think I took my whole self with me - I think I played a role of being too cool and hip.
They're very uh you know I don't come from the suburbs and a jolly Disney type of lifestyle. I come from something totally different. And they're cool and bare minimum so it's not always a money issue for me.
In high school during marathon phone conversations cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were or at least who I thought they might become.
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once and by car forever after.
The car has become the carapace the protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man.
My culture-deprived aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.
As a woman who has some sort of power you have to have a man that can take that. It's hard to find those men.