Paulo Costanzo Quotes

I thought it was normal to recycle pants and shoes from your older cousins. That was just my way of life. At the end of the month, there was not much food in the refrigerator and you're hoping the first comes so food can come again. You never forget those things.

We were so poor. Every item of clothing came from a thrift store.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.

I was very poor when I was young.

I can't dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by.

I was an only child. We were so poor, my parents and I had the same room.

My parents raised me and my six siblings with little money... but lots of love.

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Growing up, we didn't have any money - we shopped where you picked your shoes out of a bin. When I was little, I said, 'When I grow up, I'm going to have nice shoes.'

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

I was just a regular kid in poverty, struggling.

When you grow up without it, you want to have it. It's funny, in America some people say, 'Why do you want to make money so much?' And I say, 'Well, I guess you didn't starve as a kid.'

We were so poor when I was a kid that I had a sister who was stamped, 'Made In Japan.'

When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.

My parents never really had that much money, so I kind of live in the same world that they do.

I did not have any money, so when I came to New York, I just dressed myself with whatever I could find and the Army-Navy store.

As an actress for most of my life, I am profoundly familiar with poverty.

My wife, Sharon, and I started with nothing when we got married. I was driving a 1902 Pinto and eating off a card table.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

I was raised really poor and so was my husband.

I traveled with my mother, Lela, and there was never enough money. I always had to roll down my silk stockings and carry a doll when we bought train tickets so I could go half-fare. If we had $3, we always figured how to tip for the trunks and still eat.

I grew up without a lot of money and my parents grew up with far less money. And that's kept me in line. Really in line.

I lived by the candlelight for two years because I couldn't afford power. It was nice and romantic at the time, but if you can't afford power you're pretty broke. You endure it.

I grew up in poverty. For 25 years I was fed on aid.