David Johansen Quotes

When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.

When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.

To me, I'm the epitome of what a ghetto child is: I was raised by a single parent; I stayed in apartments my whole life; I don't think I've ever cut the grass.

I'm from the housing projects, where people can't afford $150 shoes.

My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.

I grew up in a mobile home, but it wasn't like white trash - it was a beautiful mobile home park, I had a loving mother, there were kids everywhere, there was a playground in the center, I just grew up in poverty.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

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.

I grew up playing with kids from Hurt Village, playing with kids from other housing projects, Lamar Terrace, because my grandmother lived in that particular area. So, I always wondered how I would have turned out if I would have lived in that particular given circumstance.

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.

When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn't even have a Christmas tree.

I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.

We definitely weren't poor growing up, but we weren't rich.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

I came from a poor family. My father was from Glasgow, Scotland; my mother's brothers were brakemen on the railroad. We didn't have anything but mush for breakfast.

I was raised in a lower-income family, and we were wild.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

I was on significant financial aid, an only child, with parents who didn't have much living in North Carolina.

You know, when you're poor and you have a bunch of kids in your family, you don't know that everybody's not poor.

My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.

My parents didn't have any money.

My kids never had the advantage I had: I was born poor.

When I was a kid, our family was not that rich.

I grew up in the projects with four older brothers.