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

You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don't want to live any other way.

The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.

I live 50 miles from London and we've got some of the highest levels of teenage and childhood poverty in the country. It's disgusting. Just because it's a rural area, it gets forgotten.

I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.

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.

Extreme poverty is extremely dangerous.