My ambition was to be cosmopolitan. I grew up in the suburbs. I went to college in Maine. I had a dream in my head that if you wanted to be the most urbane, living-life-to-the-fullest kind of person, Paris was the place to be.
I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living. My ambition was to be cosmopolitan. I grew up in the suburbs. I went to college in Maine. I had a dream in my head that if you wanted to be the most urbane, living-life-to-the-fullest kind of person, Paris was the place to be.
I grew up in Paris. Well, in the suburbs of Paris.
Football is open to anyone, especially somebody like me who grew up in the Paris suburbs.
I have an affinity with Algeria, because I grew up with plenty of Algerian friends in the suburbs of Paris.
I grew up in the suburbs, sometimes country-like suburbs because we moved around, but mostly suburbs.
I grew up in the Seattle suburbs - the suburbs of suburbs. Where I'm from, it's super quiet, just woods and nothing.
I grew up in the D.C. suburbs, and what I like about that place is that there's not a strong regional affect in the cultural imagination like there is in Dallas or San Francisco or New York City. You have a little more freedom as a novelist this way. The suburbs become a generic idea, and the place doesn't intrude into the narrative.
I grew up in a Navy family, and like most service families, we traveled a lot and moved a lot. I grew up on both coasts and in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Rockville, Maryland, and have had a great time doing it.
Over the years, I grew up as a person and made mistakes and had a great time and had a baby, kind of grew as a person and as an artist.
I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, an arid kind of place, but every day I took the ferry across the harbour to get to school. I'd watch the ships coming in and going out.
When I was in college, I wanted to be editor of 'Reason' when I grew up. It was an impractical ambition, especially since the magazine was located in Santa Barbara, way off any journalist's normal career path.
The Eternal Kansas City song came from a dream sequence. It was actually kind of weird. I had this dream about a Kansas City type of thing while I was up at Stevie Winwood's place near Cheltenham, in Britain. I went into this small town and I was walking along and this dream thing was still in my head.
My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.
When I came up with the concept of 'The Dream,' on the surface he just seemed like another creepy bad man or villain. It had to be played by someone larger than life, but not malicious. And Keanu Reeves is that person to me, and he was The Dream like I wanted The Dream.
I think that I'm reaching a point in my life and in my career where soon it will be important for me to get out of the way and let younger, hungrier, more interesting people do what it is that I do. Maine is a wonderful place to hide, because no one ever looks for you there. And the goal of every person in Maine, whether native or from away, seems to be to mitigate as possible all human interaction. So it's a good place to disappear in.
I think my mom and dad both wanted to get across to me that... I obviously grew up with great privilege and was very lucky and was able to afford college and not have student loans, and they would pay for college, but beyond that, it would be up to me to make a living.