Slum Life Quotes

But one of the best things away from playing was a visit to a Mumbai slum. You see people in their conditions, getting stuck into their way of life and not moaning, and realise how lucky you are to be doing what you are doing. It put things into perspective.

When I was 16, I made some little 35mm documentaries about the poor in London. I went round Notting Hill, which was a real slum in the 1950s, shooting film.

For the urban poor the police are those that arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

Walking around a slum in a third world country quickly puts into perspective what really matters in life. It grounds you in a way that you can't experience without getting out of your bubble at home.

Kate Boo's reporting is a form of kinship. Abdul and Manju and Kalu of Annawadi will not be forgotten. She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights. There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them. If we receive the fiery spirit from which it was written, it ought to change much more than that.

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

You can look at a slum or a peasant village, but it is only by entering into the world - by living in it -that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

I work a lot in the slums of Tondo, Manila, and the life there is poor and very sad. And I've always taught to myself to look for the beauty of it and look in the beauty of the faces of the children and to be grateful.

When we were walking through the narrow alleys [of the Mathare Valley slums], it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there.

I had to do a lot of preparation for 'Kaaka Muttai.' I had to literally spend every night and morning in the slums, observing the life of people there, and work on my diction.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

'Slumdog Millionaire' is a fairy tale, but it starts in a place you really believe, and that came from spending two months wandering around the slums picking up stories and talking to people.

Favelas [slums] are not always a problem. Favelas can sometimes really be a solution.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.

Slum children eat crow's eggs for nutrition yet nobody respects this common bird. It's the exotic birds which fascinate all.

First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.

The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.

I lived in a favela.

War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It's further east than Hell's Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.

There are a number of parallels between the slums of Brazil and those found in my hometown, Karachi. The dichotomy that exists in Brazil is uncannily similar to that found in Pakistan, and I hope to one day make a film that follows similar themes.

I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.