The slum is the measure of civilization.

We lived in a slum area in the suburbs of Mumbai.

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

To one extent, if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.

I want to show that the underdog can win. I believe we're all the same: you, a slum girl, my mother.

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.

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

The fighter loses more than his pride in the fight; he loses part of his future. He's a step closer to the slum he came from.

Besides being a slum kid with no great education in anything except how to fight and stay alive and steal, I also had this temper.

When people hear my music, they ain't really hearing about no shiny stuff, the glamorous life. They're going to hear that gritty, slum.

I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.

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.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

When I was 18, I moved out of home. I decided to try to be an actor, so took myself off to slum it with nine humans and a million mice in a red Leytonstone house.

I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.

'Slumdog' was my first movie, and I had never been to India before - I was just a teenager in the U.K. with my headphones and my Nike shoes. What did I know about growing up in a slum?

My parents were not poor, I mean we were a very average middle-class family of academics, but my grandfather happened to have built house literally next to one of Kolkata's largest slum.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

I came to know God when I was 12, started working in the ministry when I was 13, working in the slum area, living among the poor, loving it, and having this belief that to love the poor I needed to be poor.

I went to what can only be described as a slum school in Salford - rough and full of trainee punks - but I was very lucky in that I had one inspiring teacher, John Malone, who gave the whole class an interest in romantic poetry.

I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web.

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.

In 1986, I had gone on a hunger strike with Anand Patwardhan rooting for an alternative land for slum dwellers. My mother got very nervous and told my father to tell me that, 'what am I doing?' He sent me a telegram that read: 'Best of luck, comrade!'

We are seeing a changed Mumbai, but having showcased Dharavi in 'Slum Dog Millionaire' brought shame and disgrace to our city. Whenever the firangs visit Mumbai, they must visit Dharavi; it has become a sightseeing spot. However, I feel saddened about it.

I am aware it's easy and may be fashionable to pose with a slum child, and the irony of getting the media along means that it can come across as disingenuous. But you take these things on board, and you hope you mean it whenever you get stuck into something.

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting.

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.

Have you ever stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai? I'd warmly recommend it. It's super luxurious, and right next door, there's a classic slum. So you can do a quick slum tour and get back to your sanctuary without any inconvenience but with some excellent snaps.

I have a huge promotion: you've heard from me on 'Vantage Point' and also with 'Cyrano Fernandez' - that is a Venezuelan movie that I star in and co-produced, and it's based on the romance of Cyrano de Bergerac. And it's set in a Venezuelan slum. It's a free version of the French play.

Italy is a tough country to be a comedian in - I can't invent stuff like this. Nearly eighty crooks in Parliament - that's about one crook in twelve. It's worse than Scampia, the most dangerous Naples slum, which is infested by the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. There, the criminals are only one in fifteen!

'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing.

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. That was our first school.

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