Nevil Shute Quotes

It's the intelligent thing to be frugal.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

Cheapness is a great virtue.

I don't like to waste anything. Any food left over from the night before is always eaten the next day.

Frugality is a great revenue.

All of our movies are lower budget, and that makes them more interesting, too: we have to come up with solutions other than throwing money at problems.

Oddly enough, the lack of money makes us a little bit more creative in a sense.

When starting out, don't worry about not having enough money. Limited funds are a blessing, not a curse. Nothing encourages creative thinking in quite the same way.

Less money sometimes allows you to be more creative.

The best substitute for money is ingenuity.

It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing.

Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention.

Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree.

All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful

There is always a way out for those clever enough to find it.

Lack of money always means a surplus of creativity, in the best case.

Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak'd meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

Mend your clothes and you may hold out this year.

It's smart to be thrifty.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other's designs, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.

Drink your fill when the jar is first opened, and when it is nearly done, but be sparing when it is half-empty; it's a poor savingwhen you come to the dregs.

Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.

Actually there were [ in MacGyver] a lot of things about the original that focused on the character, but not too many people seem to remember that.