John H. Vandenberg Quotes

Most of the things we buy are wants. And we call them needs, but they're wants.

I collect clothes - they keep building and building. I buy them instead of having them washed.

I do, kind of, spend a lot. And just on stupid things. Because I don't really know what to do. What are you supposed to do? Um. It just seems like way too much. We don't deserve it, at all, for what we do.

I love buying things. I could be one of those crazy hoarders.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

In Los Angeles, I'm always in Fred Segal. It's become a ritual. I have lunch and then buy lots of things I don't need. Usually tons of clothes for the kids that they grow out of in 10 seconds.

We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.

Drew is a shopaholic. He must have 400 suits and 180 pairs of shoes. I have three pairs of jeans, and that's it. I shop in his closet and take anything I want.

We buy too much stuff we just don't need. We're trying to look cute for next weekend when we ought to be thinking about the next decade.

I look about my house and see there are lots of lovely things in it, but I constantly buy more.

I used to literally spend every dime I had on clothes, shoes and getting fresh.

I can't tell you how much money I waste on plaid shirts, whisky that I hate the taste of, and Moleskine notebooks that I never write in.

Wretched excess is an unfortunate human trait that turns a perfectly good idea such as Christmas into a frenzy of last-minute shopping.

I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.

People want what they want. And I guess that is a reason we have this big credit card problem and a lot of these foreclosures.

Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.

If an alien with an accounting degree touched down in America, it might conclude that we're a weird cult that spends 11 months living frugally and four crazy weeks buying tons of stuff we don't need. It wouldn't be entirely wrong, either.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

My illness is one often characterized by dramatic overspending - in my case through frenzied shopping sprees, credit card abuse, excessive hoarding of unnecessary material goods and bizarre generosity with family, friends and even strangers.

How much of this junk shall we buy?

We have a bad habit. We buy what we want and beg what we need.

Seeing so much of the same thing suppresses the desire to buy.

I buy a lot of electronics, some which I never take out of the box!

If I go to the department store, I get no excitement: I can buy the entire department store instead of one bag. So I lost excitement of shopping.

I have more than 100 pairs of Jimmy Choos and I feel very guilty about it.