Buck Owens Quotes

I know what it's like not to have food in the fridge or money to buy more.

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.

I grew up with nothing - I remember sometimes not having shoes.

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

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

I have crooked toes from wearing boots that didn't fit me because that's all I could afford as a kid.

Sometimes we used to eat once a day... chicken backs. You could buy four chicken backs for a quarter.

I was hungry a coupla' times but for the most part I ate every day... I got to go to school for free.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.

As a young man, I lived through the Great Depression, when banks failed and so many lost their jobs and homes and went hungry. I was fortunate to have a job at a canning factory that paid 25 cents an hour.

After you've cut back everything else, food is the last to go. I didn't mind putting an extra jumper on if I had food in the fridge. It was the point where I had an extra jumper on and no food in the fridge that I realised things had gone badly wrong.

I am from a poor background in Portugal. We were medium-down, not down-and-out. My parents felt problems around food in the past but they made sure I did not miss anything. But there was nothing extra, no luxuries.

Going through economic hard times is something I know firsthand.

I didn't live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. My diapers were nappy cloth. I didn't live in a big house.

We came from nothing really. One house. Ten people. Even days the lights was off. The worst days was not eating. Surviving off rice and toast.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

I didn't have money growing up.

I was poor my whole life.

I was living on a loaf of bread a week.

Sometimes, we didn't have enough to eat. I'd go to school with no lunch money, and my school would have to provide it.

I come from a family where some nights you don't know where food's going to come from. There's nights where you're going to have go to bed hungry.