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If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.

The one thing I've always said: Let your family and close friends be the judge of who you are as a person. Don't worry about being judged by others who don't know you, because your family and close friends know what you're all about, good and bad.

Suburbia is all about private ownership and not having to share, and it leads to a paranoid, defensive mindset. I know this, having grown up in Essex.

If you're playing your character and you're running into all these people who know who you are and treat you in a way that doesn't pertain at all to the character, it takes you out of it more, so when you're alone in a city where people don't know you, you can kind of pretend even more and get into the head space of where you need to be.

I live in a little suburb close to Kansas City called Prairie Village, where there's a feeling of everybody knowing everybody else. I think the same thing is true of New York City, by the way.

But instead of that stuff you get relationships with people and neighbors that you would never get in a city. People in small towns are a lot more open.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

And I think what people in New Jersey have gotten to know about me over the last decade that I've been in public life is what you see is what you get. And I'm no different when I'm sitting with you than I am when I'm at home or anyplace else.