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Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing.

I think there are people who really love the comfort of their small town, and there are people who feel stuck by it.

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

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 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.

I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

I feel like, big city or small town, you can relate to following your parents' footsteps or putting your own dreams on the back burner or vices that we get caught up in - that whole cycle. That's not just a small-town thing. That's a life thing.

I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.

You don't have to go very far away from Scandinavia to realize what an idyllic society it is.