As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven’t eaten for three hours, we think we’re starving. You’re not starving – human beings can go for 30 days without food.

I’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

I have never felt more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman. But I am constantly thinking about my own health and making sure that I’m eating right and getting exercise and watching the aches and pains. I want to be this really fly 80-90-year old.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

When I was a young kid, I did not even dream about playing for my country. It was such a farfetched thing to play for India.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

Real food, I’ve found, is actually better than dieting.

I never dreamed of being a pop star when I was a child.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

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.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

I eat next to nothing.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

I have to be on such a strict diet constantly.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.

You know, if I listened to Michael Dukakis long enough, I would be convinced we’re in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going without food and medical attention and that we’ve got to do something about the unemployed.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

I learned to walk as a baby, and I haven’t had a lesson since.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

I can’t remember what made my dad take us karting for the first time, I can’t remember really. I was into motorsport by then and I knew everything, and every driver, it was around 2009, 2008. That’s when I first properly knew about Formula One. Those were the days.

In the real world, children love me.

Being a kid’s not easy. You’re transforming and becoming a human being. At some point, you have everyone taking care of you, and then, all of a sudden, you’re out in the world.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

I won’t eat anything green.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.