Mark Burnett Quotes

Poor people have more fun than rich people, they say; and I notice it's the rich people who keep saying it.

I grew up in a lot of different places. I always saw the bigger picture. I was around rich kids with country houses and private jets. No disrespect to those people, but I never thought they were super geniuses. I couldn't see how I wasn't going to have those things, too.

The possessors of wealth can scarcely be indifferent to processes which, nearly or remotely have been the fertile source of their possessions.

I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn't feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school.

It is true that rich people can spend more money than middle class people, but there's this upper limit on what we can spend. I drive a very nice car, but it's only one car. I don't own a thousand, even though I earn a thousand times the median wage. I have a few jackets, not a few thousand.

In Russia, or anywhere, people don't like rich people. Yeah, OK, I have money, but the question is how I use it. It's not easy, believe me; it's not easy.

There's a difference between being posh and being rich.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

Contemplation is a luxury of the middle class, the very rich.

I find it hard to be labelled in this new 'super-rich' category because we all grew up with very little. The idea that 'to get rich is glorious' is really a new phenomenon. I certainly didn't grow up like that.

Perhaps they do not recognize themselves, for a rich man is even harder to define than a poor one.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

One thing I know about the rich, being rich, is that you can take money from me and tomorrow, I'm still going to be rich.

I just thank God that I didn't grow up with so much money or privilege because you had to create ways to make it happen.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

I was not the son of a worker or lacking in material or social resources for a relatively comfortable existence; I could say I miraculously escaped wealth.

It's not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, 'Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.'

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in Beverly Hills, but I was born with a great deal of self-worth.

I Googled 'What do rich people buy?' Because I don't feel like a rich person, and I don't really try to act like a rich person, so I don't know what they buy. I didn't really like the stuff I saw, so I'm gonna stick with my humble lifestyle and just keep working out.

You have to accommodate the rich and the new rich under the same roof.

The beauty of not growing up middle class is that you don't think like the middle class. You don't have anything to protect, you know what I mean?

Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.

I feel like money is an interesting thing when you don't come from it.

I wanted to get rich, like anyone from my background.