Stephen Frears Quotes

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

Poverty is the schoolmaster of character.

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.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

I've always been the person to look at any turmoil as temporary. I recall times where my mom was working five and six jobs, and there's still no food in the house.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

I've been in a lot of trouble and come out of it. I think it shows a lot of good character.

When real people fall down in life, they get right back up and keep walking.

I've gone through many, many things. I tell you something, that if it doesn't kill you, you get stronger.

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.

I've always believed in survival.

Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

When I am made fun of in the press I just remember those days when I'd come home to find that the water had been turned off because my mother couldn't afford the bill. Suddenly, everything feels easier.

As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it.

I learned a lot in those first years in Miami, while struggling just for survival, by observing my father's fortitude.

The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.

I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.

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.

It was just you had to be strong, and if you weren't strong you're a victim and you're not going to make it. That was the reality when I was growing up.

There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.

What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

A guy's who has all the money he needs and never faced any hard times, he won't have any character. But when you've had it tough and you've had it rough and you thought you were at the end of the rope and you work your way out of it, that's the way you build character.

When my trust fund ran out, I panicked. I have a lot of admiration for the kids who come to the big city with nothing and make it.

Sometimes bad things are going to happen in your life, and those things can make you stronger if you just learn how to get over them.

Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.