Claude McKay Quotes

But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.

We are an impoverished society. It is a poor society indeed that can’t pay for … amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities

Poor, desperate creature; he wants an audience … the people won’t turn out to hear him.

... miserable and almost friendless objects are ushered upon the stage of life, inheriting those vices, which idleness, and the bad example of their parents naturally produce.

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

We hold accountable all the pussy-footing Presidential candidates, Democrats, Republicans, independents, who pretend our children and our cities do not exist.

It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowding tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.

A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.

Some places you play in America, it's like 'On the Waterfront.'

I've been up in the Arctic Circle where they have hockey rinks that don't have any heating. So it's - 40 C outside, it's - 55 inside. Or there's a social centre but no budget for anybody to run any programs. Stuff we wouldn't accept in Winnipeg, but we let it go on and on and on.

Living and working in the centre of a city, one cannot but be affected by the sight of the homeless on the streets. They are almost an expected feature of life in a big city, and it is tempting to think there is little or nothing that can, or even should, be done about it. This is not so.

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 started writing because I saw such a huge lack of complex stories about the inner city.

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

Tough times were when I didn't have a job and nobody called me.

Urbanisation, poverty, youth unemployment are leading to violence-prone cities.