Buck Owens Quotes

I traveled with my mother, Lela, and there was never enough money. I always had to roll down my silk stockings and carry a doll when we bought train tickets so I could go half-fare. If we had $3, we always figured how to tip for the trunks and still eat.

I remember that at the beginning of the month, the kind of menus my mom and father would prepare for us would have fish, chicken. But at the end of the month - because my father would be waiting for paycheck - the refrigerator would get empty. I remember that without a lot of food left, some of the best meals happened right there.

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

When I was busking, when I was paying for petrol with silver coins or when I was sneaking into hostels so I could park my van up and sleep in it, I had the best time of my life.

My mother and father were lovely parents, always quite hard up, but very hard-working.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, 'You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back, and we're happy, so we are rich.'

We had no electricity, no gas. Food was probably our greatest entertainment - the most fun thing that we could do was food.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish.

My wife, Sharon, and I started with nothing when we got married. I was driving a 1902 Pinto and eating off a card table.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

My dad used to hunt ducks, and my mom would put them in the pot. We lived really modestly. We had very little money.

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

I would roll up pennies to take the subway to work in Times Square. I was broke, but I was happy.

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.

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.

When I look back I can't believe how my parents managed, but the cliche is true. We didn't have money, but we were rich in so many other ways.

I lived on nothing for years - squatted where I lived and where I worked, stole electricity, made things from stuff I found in skips, used paper that had been discarded - you do everything you can do to keep going and not have to get a job.

My parents raised me and my six siblings with little money... but lots of love.

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.

I used to live off of nothing.

My mother made all of our clothes, my friends' mothers made all of their clothes. This was the Depression.

When my parents were dating, they were very poor, so my dad couldn't take my mom out. They would go to the grocery store and pick out funny looking vegetables. When I grew up, we'd still go and find the ones with personality.

Growing up in Texas, mum had five girls to feed on a very limited budget, so we'd end up eating the same thing until it was gone - some weeks it was carrots.