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I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need, it's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you'd do anything to lift that burden.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.

Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it's about work.

It's difficult to write about poverty in a way that doesn't feel cliched.

There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.