I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

My family didn't have any money growing up. I'm just a girl from the ghetto; from Indio, California.

I came out of what we romance writers call The Romance Ghetto, because we get so little respect.

Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.

How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?

The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.

There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.

My mom knew early on that I was gay, and she knew that I had to get out of the ghetto.

The main reason I wanted to be successful was to get out of the ghetto. My parents helped direct my path.

'Chopper City in the Ghetto' - a lot of it was B.G.'s real story.

Most of our songs were just talking about what we had seen in the ghetto. We weren't thinking, 'Oh, this is going to be large and we'll have gold records.' We were thinking it would be local and we'd make a couple of bucks.

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.

I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

They don't have to tell me what life is like in a ghetto.

I came out of what we romance writers call The Romance Ghetto, because we get so little respect.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto - I tell people you don't have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

We used to go to Palm Springs, ditch school when I was in eleventh grade, and go hang out poolside with our ghetto blaster and listen to Pat Metheny 'Offramp' and kind of trip out on a lot of his music.