I grew up, as I joke around, in the 'People's Republic of Charlestown' in the city of Boston. And I was blessed to be raised right there on Monument Square in Charlestown, and every morning I'd hop on the bus and go on a 45-minute ride out to the sub...
I've got no dark secrets, I wasn't beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that's where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.
One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.
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 ...
I grew up Southern Baptist, so my experience was fairly conservative. Not archly so, but I think Memphis - when you get to certain parts of Memphis - are more liberal for sure. But I grew up, until I was about 13 or 14, in a section called Whitehaven...
We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary...
I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, and various patrioti...
On the one hand, I'm this guy who grew up in the suburbs of New York City to very conservative parents, and the other side of me is fascinated by the peripheries of our culture, maybe because that's where our culture is most in transition and where t...
I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in ...
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 ...
Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated i...
I grew up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in the early '90s, and hospitals and doctor's offices offered to x-ray candy. I was 7 or 8. The day after Halloween, my brother and I were sorting all of our candy, and my mom asked if she could have a piece o...
The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much...
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit...
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on m...
I think you can totally be a totally normal kid from the suburbs of Chicago and go off and play shows. It's one of those things that when you go home, you're still the nerd you were when you left, and your parents still get to yell at you about clean...
I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in ...
When I made my first film, I had hardly ever seen a camera before, and I was a young man when I arrived in Paris from the suburbs. At the time, I didn't talk much. I was very shy, so the bluff served me. I was telling people that I had no money, and ...
He'd been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they'd be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you wo...
Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environmen...
About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man’s jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. H...
