Kaya Scodelario Quotes

I grew up with pretty much nothing - in the hood, the ghetto - whatever you want to call it.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

If I didn't already sense that I was different, I certainly was reminded, whether by my parents or by the other school kids. Not just reminded. Told... I was made to believe it wasn't right. If I went a little bit too off - slap! It was Dad's upbringing and it was Victorian, and that's the way he was.

We were poor. My mother got our clothes out of the free box at the church, you know? So much of when you're a kid is about relating about what you watch on TV. And who's got these cooler shoes, and 'Let's trade lunches.' And I was just like, 'I don't have a television. I have a rock and a piece of tofu.'

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.

The council estate I grew up on wasn't too bad.

Where I come from, the estates are not so nice. It is a bit gritty.

My mom grew up in the Soviet Bloc, and she was a Tiger Mom. We didn't get away with much.

A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can't even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.

I'd spend every summer in Longview on my grandfather's farm. It was a tiny little town divided by a river, which was the segregation line: that side white, this side black. And meanwhile, I lived in Compton - basically, another whole world sealed into 10 square blocks. It's interesting how insular an environment can be.

I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.

I was born in South Carolina. On my dad's farm, I didn't have much. I'm just a poor kid who worked in a produce market.

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.

My childhood was not always a happy one because we had to visit our father in jail, as my father was often imprisoned by the Pakistani rulers.

Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.

If you are from an ordinary working class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.

My mum and dad came from lower-working-class Glasgow, which was tough. Literally, if you see a cat there with a tail, it's a tourist.

My mum was quite strict, so I was in a very strict household.

All my life, I have lived in the chawls. They are my people.

My look and my character come from my experiences as a child. I wasn't allowed to have girl toys, and I grew up poor. I also had a rough relationship with my stepdad.

Well, my grandmother, she raised me in public housing.

I was from this small town, and my parents were poor.

I was raised in a time when parents brought out belts, and you got tough love.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.