Anselm Kiefer Quotes

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.

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.

People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing. We had to amuse ourselves, so we had to become amusing.

I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.

I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.

I've always found poverty a source of strength.

There is something to be said for people who have to work hard, be creative, produce what they have with little - or no - means. Those of us from poor homes have the advantage of thinking for ourselves and of knowing that when times get hard, things could always be worse.

Since I was younger I've been making the best out of nothing.

My father, who was a hair colourist, died when I was young, so my mother had to work very hard. But at the same time, I do believe that if you have everything, it is easy to make a dinner. When you only have flour and water and olives and potatoes, you have to be much more creative, and that's what my mother is all about.

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.

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.

You don't need money to be creative. The ghetto builds champions every day.

I like to see the world from different levels. Even when I'm making a candle or designing a piece, I like to sit on the floor to polish or make it from scratch. I haven't seen really tough times, but my husband has come up the hard way. He has even seen poverty.

When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

My mom raised us three boys by herself on welfare. It's not worse than anybody else's life.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don't buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

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.

Although we didn't have much when I was growing up in Split, Croatia, my parents always tried to ensure that my sister and I had the things we needed, and it was enough for us.

They can put me in a jungle. Still, I can create.

I grew up learning to do more with less.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

It's no big thing, but you make big things out of little things sometimes.

My life has always been chaotic. From the time I got dressed in the back of a deflated, flat-tired, fish-smelling station wagon for Rocky. It's always been do it yourself, kind of like paper-clip it together.