My culture-deprived aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.

As a culture I see us as presently deprived of subtleties. The music is loud the anger is elevated sex seems lacking in sweetness and privacy.

But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

I was a queen and you took away my crown a wife and you killed my husband a mother and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it but do not make me suffer long.

I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself and I had to make good.