Jeff Kinney Quotes

My brother and I slept on the couch. I didn't get my own room until I was in college. We didn't even have a telephone until I was in college.

My father used to be away for months at a time, and he'd never leave any money for food, so my brother and I had to go out and nick it.

My mother is most attached to my brother because she has the feeling that she could not provide him anything. By the time I was born, at least I got a meal and a half a day, but he sometimes got only water.

My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don't know what's wrong about a kid stealing when he's hungry.

None of us kids had a middle name. We were lucky we had any name at all. By the time my mother got around to naming one, there was another on the way.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.

As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could.

Growing up, we didn't have anything. My mum wasn't well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post.

Raising a family is difficult enough. But it's even more difficult for single parents struggling to make ends meet. They don't need more obstacles. They need more opportunities.

There was a lot of brokenness in my family. Let's just say that I was raised by my grandparents.

The first eight years of my life, we lived in an abandoned diner - we were basically squatters.

My family were very poor. I am one of nine siblings: two girls and seven boys. Only my brother and I play in Europe, and then three more work in Europe, and another plays in Tunisia. This family is a footballing family, but our lives have not always been good.

When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.

We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little - my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colonel. He was teaching in military academy military topography.

I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life.

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

I lived in a homeless shelter. That's what I mean when I say I've been in situations where people need help. I don't remember my exact age, but I remember there were two bunk beds and five of us in there: me, my three sisters and my mum.

I'm from Pemberton, Wigan, and was born into a poor family. I grew up on a council estate. My dad was at first in the Army and then in the coal mines. My mother had four children by the time she was 23 so money was always tight.

My dad grew up with straight-up no running water. He slept in a twin bed with his two sisters and his mom, like 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory' style: like, feet at the head, feet at the head alternating. And then I think his dad slept on, like, a bed of newspapers on a floor in their apartment.

Mum didn't have shoes. She was the eldest of 10 kids, and some nights they went without food. That's why, from a young age, I wanted to work hard and change that cycle, to provide not only for my parents but my siblings, too.

I came from a working class family. We lived in a prefab. We had nothing, but we had everything. I was out of the house at 12 to live with my grandmother, who was on her own, and I was expected to be the man about the house. At 15, I was living in digs in London after signing for Tottenham.

My father left me when I was 6. My mother tried to take care of all of us on public assistance.