Vivienne Westwood Quotes

When you grow up in poverty and learn how to survive it, it's something that stays with you forever.

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.

I would never wish my upbringing on anyone... but I wouldn't take it back for the world.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

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

I was from a tough neighborhood, and we didn't have a lot of money, but my dad worked hard, and my mom is good at budgeting things. That made me appreciate things.

I had a very difficult upbringing.

I don't think anyone who has been to Africa comes away untouched by the place. You see a lot of beauty and optimism, but you also come away with an awareness of the huge gulf between what most of us have and what most of them have to make do with. Then, every now and then, a famine or a war makes everything a hundred times worse.

The war years were the most difficult time of my life. There was real famine in Moscow. The water froze inside the houses. There was no heat.

As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.

I grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas... raised by my grandmother. We were very poor and had no indoor plumbing. My grandmother was a very religious woman, though, and she gave me a lot of faith and inner strength.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, 'I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me.'

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

I grew up beyond proud - we didn't have much, but we had a lot of love.

It really was hand-to-mouth and you can say, 'Poor little me, how dreadful, what a deprived childhood', but I didn't feel that way at all. It's all about the attitude at home.

In prosperity remember adversity.

Duisburg was the worst industrial, depressive part of Germany. But it was great. We had nothing, but I didn't miss nothing so that was fine.

We were rather poor, but we always had what we needed.

When you're poor, an egg sandwich is dinner and you cut your potatoes with a butter knife.

Both my parents lived through a world war. My grandparents lived through two world wars. And they didn't go around saying, 'Look for happiness.'

We in New York were very poor in the depths of the Depression - but I must say, that was the best time of my life.

My mother really struggled when we were young. She was on food stamps and welfare. Looking back, I know we didn't have a lot, but I never felt I was at a loss for anything.

We grew up in a small house with four bedrooms. I shared a bedroom with three brothers. But I enjoy the way that I was brought up. It kept me hungry. It kept me humble.

Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.

I try to see the lightness of life, and that comes from having a hard time growing up.