Michael Caine Quotes

I can't pay my [bills]. I can't go to work. My car is out of gas.

I can't tell you how much money I waste on plaid shirts, whisky that I hate the taste of, and Moleskine notebooks that I never write in.

I remember my dad took my ice skates. One day I asked my mum: 'Where are my ice skates?' because I loved to skate in the winter. And she said through tears: 'Dad is selling them now… we don't have money for this week.'

I was just a toddler when my dad died in a car crash. With my mum, Eunice, being a young widow with a large family, she really struggled money-wise.

I grew up in Scotland in the 1970s. There was not much money. The most popular Christmas toy was probably a potato.

I forgot my purse of laughter when I dressed this mornin'," she told me. "Have you not bought anythin' the last few days? Prices have gone up. Pay or starve, it's all one to me.

[My father] didn't make much money, and I tell a lot of people, you know, I was a vegetarian before people knew what a vegetarian was. That's all I ate was vegetables.

To be a Prodigal's favourite,-then, worse truth, A Miser's pensioner,-behold our lot!

In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.

Wonderful, I like cars, too, I like all the great things you can buy in a department store. But when you have to buy them in order to stay unaware, comatose, then the price you pay is too high.

There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I do

I was broke until I was 40. Really broke. I could get by, but I had nothing. No health insurance, so if something happened I was screwed. I was lucky my parents had money and my brother was willing to support me for a long time. Once I started doing standup, I had an income, and that was amazing to me.

Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.

The nakedness of the indigent world may be clothed from the trimmings of the vain.

I grew up in a poor family. I had to cut everyone's hair, because we didn't have money for entertainment.

They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income... Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime

Natural fact is, I can't pay my taxes. Make me wanna holler and throw up on my hands.

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

I was pretty poor for a long time. Not *poor* poor. But college student poor. I lived for most of my adult life living on student wages, then after I got my MA and started teaching, I lived on teacher's wages, which isn't much better.

The people who pay the biggest price are those who are struggling.

For the poor, the economic is spiritual.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.