James R. Schlesinger Quotes

When you don't have much money, you get creative. There's so much money that gets wasted on big movie sets. But when you don't have much money, you improvise.

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

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.

I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

I grew up learning to do more with less.

If you want creativity, take a zero off your budget. If you want sustainability, take off two zeros.

Be thrifty, but not covetous.

By necessity, budgets require hard choices.

Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.

Mend it, fix it, make do, or do without.

Doing more and more with less and less is one form of being generous. In fact, the easiest way to become rich is by being generous.

I've always sworn that not having enough money has saved me from mediocrity.

All to whom want is terrible, upon whatever principle, ought to think themselves obliged to learn the sage maxims of our parsimonious ancestors, and attain the salutary arts of contracting expense; for without economy none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.

Frugality includes all the other virtues.

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.

I don't spend money on anything. I don't collect anything. I don't spend it on furniture.

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

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.

Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.

My father died when I was two years old. But my mother was quite capable. She raised three children with his war pension which was peanuts. Yet we did not want for anything. We grew up with a certain parsimony, which is a nice thing. Then if life gives you more good, otherwise you get used to. I'm still thrifty.

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

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.

Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

If you keep a thing seven years, you are sure to find a use for it.