Carmen Dell'Orefice Quotes

My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.

I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.

My personal style comes from jugaad, a Hindi word meaning doing more with less.

I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener.

I grew up learning to do more with less.

Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

If we were poor, we didn't know it 'cause I guess you don't miss what you never had. So, you know, we made do with whatever. We used to make our own toys, and we used to play with spinning tops and marbles. A pocket full of marbles, and you were rich - you didn't worry about no money.

We were rather poor, but we always had what we needed.

We never complained, 'We don't have this or that.' Even though we had to plant certain things and harvest them to be able to eat, we never complained.

I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, 'You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back, and we're happy, so we are rich.'

To grow up under really simple circumstances, and to understand that certain things were ornamental... that made an impression on me as a child and is something I use.

From the time I got dressed in the back of a deflated, flat-tired, fish-smelling station wagon for Rocky. It's always been do it yourself, kind of like paper-clip it together.

My number-one theory in life is that style is proportional to your lack of resources - the less you have, the more stylish you're likely to be.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

He who knows how to be poor knows everything.

We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough, but not a lot.

The older I get, the less I need. I wear the same jean shorts for the whole week. I'm not running to the store to get the latest bag.

We didn't have money for toys, so I made my own.

I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.

I am most certainly not rich. But I am a man who is intrinsically lazy. And I'm more than happy to put a piece of cheese on a rice cake and call that dinner.

I was raised by my Depression-era grandma who taught me to use what you've got: Waste not, want not!

You get really scrappy when you're making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It's not like, 'Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let's do things differently.' If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best.

My mother is deeply pragmatic by nature. Perhaps you had to be, as an immigrant. You made do.

He is always a slave who cannot live on little.