Leighton Meester Quotes

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

When I first came out, I was a film student, and my mom sewed clothes. I was already doing a million things then, whatever it took to survive. If I had to braid someone's hair to get one pound for my lunch money, that's what I did.

The world knows already, they just don't have a picture up there or I'll spend the rest of my life in exile. It's hard to do that when you don't have any money.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

The one thing that made me somewhat of an animal is I didn't have anything growing up.

Anybody who lives in Colombia knows that if you don't have any money - I tell you what - you don't have many options.

Mom was a nurse's aide. She worked in various hospitals. She took care of us that way, and we ate government cheese. I survived.

I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did.

I think the guys who are sort of infantry in Somali piracy are not unlike low-level drug dealers in urban areas in America, who see it as, you know, not having many other options. I think it comes down to money and needing to survive.

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

I learned at a very early age that life is a battle. My family was poor, my neighborhood was poor. The only way that I could get away from the awfulness of life, at that time, was at the movies. There I decided that my big aim was to make money. And it was there that I became a very determined woman.

Mine was quite a working-class childhood with very little money, and my father was out of work a couple of times, which had quite a traumatic effect.

Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.

My dad worked two jobs and moved us to the suburbs, and just being a black person, I went through a lot of racism and being called names and being bullied every single day. And it was hard. I didn't have any friends.

We always had money problems. Sometimes I would lie awake at night wondering how to pay the rent.

My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'

The usual complaint is, 'I have no other way of earning a living.' The harsh reply can be, 'Do you have to live?'

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

The road can be hard on a kid if he's not careful.

Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

The fellow that has no money is poor. The fellow that has nothing but money is poorer still.