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.
New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.
Where I grew up - I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights - that's every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don't want your kids to hear growing up.
Growing up in Buffalo, I saw shuttered factories that once housed thousands of steel manufacturing jobs. I remember the hollowing-out of the middle class in our community. I witnessed hope turn to hardship as a once-thriving city reckoned with a fast-changing world.
I come from the rougher side of Sydney. I don't know whether you can compare them to the projects, but in Australia, it definitely is the rougher side.
I think that New York City in the year 1900 was a very difficult place to survive.
I'm very ambitious, despite all the challenges I face in the streets.
I lived the street life for a minute; I lost a lot of friends.
In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years.
City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.
My past is not pleasant; I grew up in a very tough town, Waterbury, Connecticut. I grew up in New York, too, but Waterbury was tougher.
If you're able to grow up in Nigeria and go through certain things, you're able to tackle anything around the world because you're able to live wherever, if you can survive in a city like Lagos or Warri or Niger Delta, as far as I'm concerned.
Nigeria is a difficult place. It is not a country for the faint of heart. On a good day, when our larger cities such as Abuja, Lagos, and Kano are filled with the teeming masses going in so many different directions, flogged by the heat and sun, bumping down uneven roads all in the name of 'the hustle,' it can appear chaotic.
I ain't going to sit here like, 'My neighborhood was hard, and I had to get out there and grind.' We made it hard for ourselves. We chose to stay on the streets.
If you've ever lived in Chicago, anyone who has, they know what a winter in Chicago is like. To be going through a tough time here in the winter would be just be all the more worse.
