Anthony Doerr Quotes

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

I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener.

Many creative people are finding that creativity doesn't grow in abundance, it grows from scarcity - the more Lego bricks you have doesn't mean you're going to be more creative; you can be very creative with very few Lego bricks.

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

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

Ya gots to work with what you gots to work with.

I used to live off of nothing.

I grew up with very little. I remember vividly using buckets of water to shower.

We called ourselves '2 Too Many' because we only had enough money for one of us.

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

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

I was eating beans by candle light for a decade.

A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.

I grew up learning to do more with less.

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

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.

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.

You think in a different way when you don't have any money. The joy of poverty is that you use your imagination to come up with stuff.

Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.

We lived in just a studio apartment with just a room and a bed that came out of the wall, and my mom couldn't afford even a Happy Meal. We ate Top Ramen. I had no toys, and I had, like, two shirts, a pair of jeans, and that was it. But I had my mom to myself, and I remember it being the coolest period of time. I loved it. I really loved it.

We had very few things. I had a couple pairs of jeans, a couple shirts. And same with my mom and sister. I think my sister had, like, two toys. We were living off of instant noodles.

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

It's amazing: when you are challenged with less, sometimes you can produce more.

You get really scrappy when you're making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It's not like, 'Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let's do things differently.' If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best.

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.