Badshah Quotes

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

Growing up low income and poor, I didn't have the best relationship with money.

I grew up working class in Atlanta.

Growing up, I wouldn't say I was poor. But my parents, although we lived in a nice, middle-class home, they had their struggles.

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

My family in general - they're troubled or poorer people.

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

I don't come from a well-off family. We're very middle-class, lower-middle-class, so that's something I cherish.

My family's challenges meant we lived hand to mouth. There were weeks when we had neither electricity nor heating.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

There's not much money in Tallahassee. Not many people can leave Tallahassee because they don't have the means.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

I grew up with no money. No money. I always struggled and had the sense that there was this other class of people who went to college - this was when I was younger.

I don't come from a rich family - it's not like we lived in a cardboard box, but we didn't have a ton of money.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

I don't come from money.

I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.

I never felt poverty as a child as we never knew anything else.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

Millions of middle-class Americans, in free fall during the economic collapse that began around 2008, have had a taste of what it means to be poor.

My mother was born into a solidly middle-class family, but, as all too many Americans understand, everything doesn't always go as planned - no matter how hard you work. She died on welfare. Without the support of the state, I shudder to think of where we would have ended up.

I come from the lower middle class, originally. We didn't have anything.

I come from a lower-middle-class family and used to stay in a housing board colony.

I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.