No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.
I've lived in so many different towns - Guttenberg, Union City, West New York, Jersey City. We didn't have a lot of money, and we'd get kicked out of places a lot.
When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.
My family was mostly unemployed working class.
poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don't move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun.
When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.
When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.
I started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.
Poverty makes you work really hard.
I grew up in a household where my mom made $16,000 a year. I know the struggle. I know how to keep those things in perspective, and I do keep it into perspective.
Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.
Poverty has strange bedfellows.
I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table... During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn't have any food for us for Thanksgiving.
Poverty is not dishonorable in itself, but only when it comes from idleness, intemperance, extravagance, and folly.
My family kinda hit the skids. We were experiencing poverty at that point. We all got a job, where the whole family had to work as security guards and janitors. And I just got angry.
I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.
It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.
I didn't have a dollar to my name in 2006.
It's such a Bore Being always Poor.
Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.
What's happened to society is we've become really pretentious. But there was a time in my life where I really had to choose between boiling potatoes and paying my gas bill, so I'd buy a can of potatoes.
I offer you what I have my Poverty
I know what it's like to have to put back food at the checkout line because you don't have enough money and those kinds of things.
Poverty is bitter, but it has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous.
