Gary Hume Quotes

I grew up in a family where our mother made our clothing. We didn't have a lot of money, so we learned how to scrimp, and we learned how to invent and to create. And those are learned skills.

We had no electricity, no gas. Food was probably our greatest entertainment - the most fun thing that we could do was food.

When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish.

We lived near a supermarket, and whatever they threw away, we would get it, and my mother would make soup. Or she would get a big can of lard, a big can of meal, a big can of flour, a big can of beans, and fix the same meal for months.

My mother made all of our clothes, my friends' mothers made all of their clothes. This was the Depression.

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.

You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There's nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.

I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.

I'll dispose of my teeth as I see fit, and after they've gone, I'll get along. I started off living on gruel, and by God, I can always go back to it again.

I'm a really good cook. I left home to start my career at 15 - so my choices were to either learn to cook or eat Ramen noodles for the rest of my life.

We used to get one room and we'd park the vehicle outside, everybody would all take showers and we'd steal towels because we knew we wasn't gonna have enough towels for all five of us to shower.

During the Depression, my dad made radios to sell to make extra money. Nobody had any money to buy the radios, so he would trade them for dogs. He built kennels in the backyard, and he cared for the dogs.

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

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.

When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.

My mom had to be resourceful. She grew up dirt poor in rural Louisiana.

When I was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I would overdraft my bank account and not have enough money to buy groceries. But I also discovered how to cook with very limited resources.

We would say we would play every pay toilet and use our own change. Across America and across the world, we just kept going and going.

Just growing up in Harlem, it didn't matter what you had to do to get fresh - you would do it.

I didn't just freestyle it. At the end, it's about bread.

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 squatted for most of my adult life. I'm not condoning squatting; it was just the only way I could do what I wanted to do. I didn't have, you know, a trust fund or parents that could help out.

In New York, ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with the hustle to survive.

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.

Always have to think like a guy with no food in his refrigerator.