Dawn French Quotes

I was working maybe four different jobs just to make ends meet. I was really broke. I could barely pay rent. I didn't have a car. I was riding my bike from one job to another and then to audition in between.

Money was tight and Mum used to do two jobs to support us.

I was having trouble making ends meet, and my beginnings weren't meeting either.

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 started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.

There were times when I couldn't even buy a loaf of bread.

My parents used to struggle to put food on our plates. Whatever little money they got, we had to make do with it.

I didn't have much but my mum and grandma gave me as much as they could, but we weren't a rich family and we had to work hard for what we got.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone.

I grew up very nice. But after college, my father said you're on you own. So I was dead broke for years. So I know what it's - I lived on 600 dollars a month for six years. I know what it's like to be dead broke. I feel bad for people who are struggling now.

I've gone for long stretches without working. I remember many times peeking into my checkbook to see if any money was left.

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.

I know what it's like to be shoveling to pay bills. I know what it's like to not have a job.

When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.

My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.

We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we'd pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off.

I did just about anything to pay the rent for a while.

I was not a girl who grew up buying $100 candles. I was the girl who ran out of gas on her way to an audition.

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.

Living in Flint, poverty is an obstacle that you have to fight through. I always had to fend for my brother and sister - I was always the one to sacrifice my meals so that they could eat.

My dad was a civil servant before he retired, and my mum worked, too. We could not always get three meals in a day; sometimes we'd struggle.

I was poor my whole life.

I may have been in financial difficulties, but I'm not a pauper.