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It's hard to say if actual places really affect the way you write.

I come from a very small city in a rather remote part of America, where writers simply weren't part of the daily fabric.

Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.

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.

Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.

I think, growing up in a small town - I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That's the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.

I know what it's like to be from an incredibly small town and the oppressiveness of it and the desire to get out. But I didn't realize that readers in Seattle, New York, and San Francisco might not get that so instinctively.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I'm not sure it's the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.