Tom Perrotta Quotes

Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

I'd be at someone's house or be up on the roof all day and I'd get lonely - stir crazy - and talk radio became this soothing voice in my life. But the idea that I was making $10 an hour and stacking drywall while these guys were making a few hundred thousand, and they were having a party, and there were Playmates and there were good times, I just couldn't imagine it.

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.

I think it's true that the 1 Percent or the elite are living in a world of, maybe, excessive privilege, and they don't fully realize how much pain and suffering, how much anxiety exists out there.

You can't very well live in a castle while your kin is on the poor side of town and barely have enough food. Some want you to get to the top and rely on you making it for them, too.

THE rich possess ample means to realize any theory they may chuse to adopt in the education of their children, regardless of the cost; but it is not so with him whose Subsistence is derived from industry.

I don't care about wealth. What seems to be upsetting is institutionalizing the advantages that wealth gives you.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

Welfare for the wealthy simply can no longer be afforded.

The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums …

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

From the day I was born, there has always existed a huge disconnect between the stories often told by the elite and those I hear from ordinary people about our country although we live in the places; and witness the same events around us.

His position makes him one of the richest men in the world coming from one of the poorest countries of the world.

Throughout our history - and that of the world - it's always come down to the friction between the haves and have-nots or between the average Joes and the large corporations. So that's a recurring theme in my work.

I went from living in the Dominican Republic - every day, my mom and I would cook, or we'd go hang out with the kids - to flying a private jet to Chicago with Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid. People had champagne, and they were going to these amazing restaurants. It was a culture shock. It's important, I think, to have that. To see both sides.

I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.

Sometimes I leave an encounter or a conversation hoping that I didn't come off as above my raisin' - hoping that I didn't make somebody feel bad for not having as much as we're fortunate to have.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.

The wealth disparity between the lowest and the highest continues to expand, and that's inappropriate.

All of us kids in the neighbourhood had to go shoeless for the same reason - all except the landlord's son, because his father had more income.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

I didn't come from a council estate like a lot of the lads do.