Patti Smith Quotes

I was eating beans by candle light for a decade.

I was raised by my Depression-era grandma who taught me to use what you've got: Waste not, want not!

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

For some reason I am one of those people who act like they were born and raised during the Depression.

I grew up learning to do more with less.

In Maine, there is a deeply ingrained sense that you can always get a little more use out of something.

I don't live for stuff and things, and if I had to live in a cardboard box, I would put curtains on it.

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.

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

My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.

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 grew up without a lot of money and my parents grew up with far less money. And that's kept me in line. Really in line.

It's not hard to tell we was poor - when you saw the toilet paper dryin' on the clothesline.

My number-one theory in life is that style is proportional to your lack of resources - the less you have, the more stylish you're likely to be.

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.

My personal style comes from jugaad, a Hindi word meaning doing more with less.

We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough, but not a lot.

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

I was 20 years old. My entire possessions consisted of $5 and a sewing machine.

I think being on a constraint with money makes you much more creative.

I used to live off of nothing.

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

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

Yeah, I came over to Cambridge with 500 quid in my pocket and I had to borrow a waistcoat off another Australian player. I couldn't afford to buy one.

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.