Poverty Narrative Quotes

I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.

You know where nice people end up? On welfare.

Poor people choose to play the role of the victim.

As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, "Tell me about the good work that you're doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give." It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.

The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.

We were poor when I was young but the difference was that the government didn't come around telling you you were poor.

Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.

Ronald Reagan, and before him, Richard Nixon, and before Nixon, a slew of conservative politicians going back through American history, have played to the idea that the great majority of poor people are somehow "undeserving," and being undeserving, merit at best very limited, oftentimes deeply coercive and humiliating, government interventions to better their finances. That narrative isn't about to disappear overnight; but it strikes me as being like a weak gruel - there's no sustenance in it, no heft behind the argument.

For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty.

A lot of rappers say 'I'm talking about stuff that goes on, what I grew up in, that I know about.' And these journalists say, 'Yeah, but you're making 80 million dollars, that stuff's not about you.' Look how long he's been making 80 million. He grew up poor in an urban city and the things he's experienced and knows.

When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

The most popular rap artists aren't supposed to be rapping about being broke.

Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money, and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous.

There are a number of parallels between the slums of Brazil and those found in my hometown, Karachi. The dichotomy that exists in Brazil is uncannily similar to that found in Pakistan, and I hope to one day make a film that follows similar themes.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

How is Hillary Clinton going to lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck.

I don't want to give this impression that I grew up in Liverpool in a cardboard box in abject poverty, but that didn't mean there weren't anxieties in my childhood about money.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

I grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, but I didn't really know I was a deprived, poverty-stricken child until the media made me aware of it.