Roger Allam Quotes

I come from a working class family. We barely had anything.

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

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.

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

I was brought up on a council estate. I know what it's like to be poor.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone.

I grew up poor.

We had to make ends meet. My parents were divorced, so my father wasn't really in my life. We grew up like most kids, just wanting things.

As someone who grew up in tough circumstances, I know that being on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in.

I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.

I wasn't born with a golden spoon in my mouth. It was a really tough life.

I was on food stamps until I was 18 and became an adult.

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.

My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother, Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year, on Christmas.

I was very poor when I was young.

We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.

I've seen poverty up close until I was four or five.

I didn't have parents I could take a million dollars from. We were a lower-class family.

Times were poor. I wore hand-me-downs. And because the kids just older than me in the family were girls, sometimes I had to wear my sisters' hand-me-downs.

I can't dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by.

When I started, I had nothing. Because my family was really, really, really poor.

I am from a poor background in Portugal. We were medium-down, not down-and-out. My parents felt problems around food in the past but they made sure I did not miss anything. But there was nothing extra, no luxuries.

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.