Alec Baldwin Quotes

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

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.

People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.

The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.

I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere.

Our idea of fun wasn't going to Disney World. It was, you want to play basketball, go outside, and make a goal. You want to play baseball? Take the old broom, take the handle off, take a tennis ball that we found somewhere, and go play baseball. We were forced to create things.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

I've always found poverty a source of strength.

Give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string; I wouldn't get bored anywhere.

Since I was younger I've been making the best out of nothing.

Kids can amuse themselves with almost anything.

We were totally confident that we would make it internationally. We had no money or instruments. We used cake tins or bottles with water in them - anything to make sounds.

One day, my bike tire broke miles from home and I found a way to fix it. That's what I learned: Even if you don't have all the tools, you can improvise.

You don't need money to be creative. The ghetto builds champions every day.

I like to see the world from different levels. Even when I'm making a candle or designing a piece, I like to sit on the floor to polish or make it from scratch. I haven't seen really tough times, but my husband has come up the hard way. He has even seen poverty.

We weren't rich by any means, but we had each other, so we were rich in family. When you don't have a lot, it just fuels that creativity. So it manifested in us doing characters of people in the neighborhood or doing impersonations of Mom and Dad. The comedy bug, it takes over.

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.

To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I think stories get better the more people try to amuse themselves.

I was not naturally talented. I didn't sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had.

It was magical growing up in New Jersey. My sister and I would go nuts in the basement and do full theater productions. We used a humidifier as a fog machine. It was over the top.

I always wanted my kids to like me and think I was funny, so I made up this story about a kid named Jake and his racecar that he had built from scratch, fully loaded with whatever fantastical gadget he or I wanted him to have at the moment. I loved making up the stories off the top of my head.

Imagination comes of not having things.