Being an Indian in the U.S. and growing up in the suburbs were the two things that really shaped my outlook.
I had a happy childhood in the suburbs of L.A. My parents instilled in us an appreciation of history, art and, most important, Motown. Jarron and I weren’t allowed to listen to rap until we were 12. After our birthday I dashed to Target and bought DJ Quik’s album ‘Quik Is the Name.’ I memorized every line.
I came from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so you do learn how to survive in that environment.
The vast majority of the guns in the U.S. are sold to white people who live in the suburbs or the country. When we fantasize about being mugged or home invaded, what’s the image of the perpetrator in our heads? Is it the freckled-face kid from down the street – or is it someone who is, if not black, at least poor?
I grew up in the suburbs and was raised on rap radio, so it took me a long time to stumble upon the acoustic guitar as a resource for anything.
I grew up in the suburbs, so I figured ‘Why not try downtown living?’ And, honestly, I love it. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at how much downtown Indianapolis has to offer.
Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the nation – especially in the suburbs.
I can remember in my early days of writing going to sort of writers’ functions and parties and things like that, and I used to get very irritated because when people heard that you came from the suburbs, they had this notion that it was very un-cool to come from there.
In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger – and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.
I don’t think I can tell any stories about how I lived in a van in Alaska. I grew up in the suburbs, I even had my own room. We weren’t poor. Everything was very normal.
I went through a phase when I was watching a lot of foreign films, just itching to get out of the suburbs and explore.
I expected to be doing basement theater in the suburbs of Stockholm.
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.
When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.
As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn’t seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.
The suburbs are the American dream, right? Living in a nice house, having a good job, a happy family.
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to think: have I really come this far? Because it is quite different, where I find myself today, from where I started off, in the streets of Waterloo, in the suburbs of Liverpool – that’s for sure.
I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut – during the school time of year – but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I’ve always loved it.
My dad was the chaplain at Mankato State University, and my mom worked in the bookstore. We lived just off-campus. Then we moved to the suburbs of Minneapolis, to New Hope, which is where I went to high school.
Many expanded-time schools have generated extraordinary results. In some cases, they have completely closed the achievement gap, all while installing curricula with a richness rivaled only by elite private schools and those in the most upscale suburbs.
Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.
It just so happened that for most of my life I’ve lived in the suburbs.
I come from the Midwest, from the suburbs – growing up hanging out at the mall and looking at the corn fields across the street. I kind of was embarrassed by it for a long time. Then I decided, ‘Hey, if everyone else can embrace their homeland and where they’re from, I can do the same!’
The thing about people from Chicago and the Northwest suburbs is that they’re very cocky. I think that serves us well in the show business world.
I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit.
That’s the trouble with the suburbs: it’s not a city, so you’re not anonymous, and it’s not a small town, so that people really care about you, but everybody kind of knows each other’s business, so you’re very judged.
It’s self-evident that we are going to have permanent problems with oil and gasoline and the prime resources that are needed to run the American suburbs. And we’re just not going to be able to run them. You know, it’s just unfortunate, it’s tragic, but it’s the truth.
My first husband dragged me out of London and made me live in the suburbs in Surrey – not where you want to be when you’re 23.
The whole 1950s notion was find the right girl, get married, move to the suburbs and then hang out with the guys while she stayed home with the babies. I felt that was sort of sad.
Before I moved to the Isle of Wight, I lived in the suburbs of London and saw ‘Fantasia,’ and it scared the living daylights out of me. And I didn’t go back to the movies until many years later to see a Lasse Hallstrom film.
In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.
Most Americans acquire dogs impulsively and for dubious reasons: as a Christmas gift for the kids. Because they saw one in a movie. To match the new living-room furniture. Because they moved to the suburbs and see a dog as part of the package.
On long car rides, we would always listen to the ‘Blues Brothers’ soundtrack and try to emulate everything that Aretha Franklin was doing. There was soul and grit in it that I think a kid from the suburbs really needed.
In most cultures, you can have a kid at 18 and it’s not a big thing. It’s not like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to get a different haircut and move to the suburbs and act, like, 35.’
The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.
Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. ‘Wayne’s World’ was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and ‘Austin Powers’ was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love.
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.
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