Patrick deWitt Quotes

I've lived in so many different towns - Guttenberg, Union City, West New York, Jersey City. We didn't have a lot of money, and we'd get kicked out of places a lot.

I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family... Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.

I grew up with a family that had very little and were at times homeless.

My family kinda hit the skids. We were experiencing poverty at that point. We all got a job, where the whole family had to work as security guards and janitors. And I just got angry.

Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.

Eviction is a cause, not just a condition of poverty.

My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off, and I just realized that I had to get it together.

We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

When I was in senior year of high school, my mom lost her job, we lost our house, and we had to move in with my uncle and my aunt.

I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.

It's diamonds in your pockets one week, macaroni and cheese the next.

When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

I had some years of definite frustration. Auditioning and not working as much as I would have liked to, or working and being paid a pittance, and sort of scrounging by in New York and sleeping on a chair that folded out into a bed.

I can tell you that when I travel the state, when I talk to people, they are really struggling, in a very real way. They're losing their jobs, they're losing their homes, they're dealing with financial challenges.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, 'Don't get comfortable, because we may not be here long.'

I know what it's like to be shoveling to pay bills. I know what it's like to not have a job.

Prolonged unemployment is a tragedy of broken lives, broken families, foreclosed homes, and life without health insurance.

Being poor sucks... It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

I didn't have a dollar to my name in 2006.

For me, I went from showering at the YMCA in L.A., eating chicken sandwiches and ramen noodles if lucky, and going from couch to couch. I'm a real story. I know the struggle.

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.