Craig David Quotes

I grew up on a council estate when I was younger.

My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

I never grew up in the Valley. I lived in Compton/Gardena my whole life.

My - I grew up in - I grew up in public housing. My dad, for most of my life, worked for the post office, which was a terrific job to get because you couldn't lose your job.

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.

Mine wasn't a lakes-and-boats kind of childhood. I grew up on a Glasgow council estate with a single mother. For our holidays, we went to Grandma and Grandad's caravan near Aberfoyle.

As someone who grew up in public housing, I've known these conditions.

For a good part of my childhood, we were super poor and lived in government housing. I don't characterize the American dream as being successful and having a lot of material wealth to show for it. I did fine without it for a really long time.

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

Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there's rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.

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.

In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness - of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.

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

New York City has become a place where it's not easy for the working class to even live.

Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I'd wind up in a soup line there.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

For too many, the shot for a brighter future is simply out of reach.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

The real people who suffer when business is leaving or not successful are the people in the middle class.

'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they're in the same boat. They've got no economic opportunities.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.