Ma Jian Quotes

When I was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I would overdraft my bank account and not have enough money to buy groceries. But I also discovered how to cook with very limited resources.

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.

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.

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.

We didn't have money for toys, so I made my own.

We lived near a supermarket, and whatever they threw away, we would get it, and my mother would make soup. Or she would get a big can of lard, a big can of meal, a big can of flour, a big can of beans, and fix the same meal for months.

Always have to think like a guy with no food in his refrigerator.

Hunger is the teacher of the arts and the bestower of invention. -Magister artis ingenique largitor Venter

My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.

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

In my experience, poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

I grew up in a family where our mother made our clothing. We didn't have a lot of money, so we learned how to scrimp, and we learned how to invent and to create. And those are learned skills.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm a really good cook. I left home to start my career at 15 - so my choices were to either learn to cook or eat Ramen noodles for the rest of my life.

We used to get one room and we'd park the vehicle outside, everybody would all take showers and we'd steal towels because we knew we wasn't gonna have enough towels for all five of us to shower.

People who, whether they inhabit the desert or settled areas and cities, live a life of abundance and have all the good things to eat, die more quickly than others when a drought or famine comes upon them

[Starving] women, children, the elderly, they don’t know anything about four-party talks. They want to eat. They want to live.

I once used a fork to comb my hair because there was a time when I didn't own a hairbrush.

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.