Making Do Quotes

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.

We were totally confident that we would make it internationally. We had no money or instruments. We used cake tins or bottles with water in them - anything to make sounds.

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

Yeah, I came over to Cambridge with 500 quid in my pocket and I had to borrow a waistcoat off another Australian player. I couldn't afford to buy one.

I didn't grow up in a wealthy family at all. Being at home all day and watching movies, that was a luxury.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

I do smaller films, I'm not getting big paydays. I feel like we're just kind of scraping together here.

It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much.

I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.

I did just about anything to pay the rent for a while.

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.

My personal style comes from jugaad, a Hindi word meaning doing more with less.

I am willing ... when I cannot get all I wish, to take what I can get.

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

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

In New York, ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with the hustle to survive.

I had a lovely childhood. For family holidays, we went as far as the car could take us - we would drive to Florida, even though it would take three days. I didn't know we didn't have a lot of money because there was always food on the table. I didn't have a lot of stuff, but I did figure skating for a long time, and I always had my skates.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

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

Nothing prompts creativity like poverty, a feeling of hopelessness, and a bit of panic.

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.

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.