Herbert Gold Quotes

In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.

I was pretty poor for a long time. Not *poor* poor. But college student poor. I lived for most of my adult life living on student wages, then after I got my MA and started teaching, I lived on teacher's wages, which isn't much better.

The people who are filing for bankruptcy in increasing numbers every year, it's not the poorest. It's not the people at the economic fringes. It's people who worked hard and played by the rules.

People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.

The people who are having the hard time right now are middle-income Americans. Under the president's policies, middle-income Americans have been buried. They're just being crushed. Middle-income Americans have seen their income come down by $4,300. This is a tax in and of itself. I'll call it the economy tax. It's been crushing.

Growing up low income and poor, I didn't have the best relationship with money.

My dad was a civil servant before he retired, and my mum worked, too. We could not always get three meals in a day; sometimes we'd struggle.

I almost went broke. I didn't file bankruptcy, but I had some miserable times there for two or three years.

I didn't have money growing up.

There were times when I didn't have enough money, I didn't have enough work, and I would panic.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

My cousin in Louisiana started a small company with a little savings, renovating houses. A single mom, she saved enough to buy a home and provide child care for her son. When the economy went belly up, so did her company. She was forced to sell her home and move in with her parents.

I forgot my purse of laughter when I dressed this mornin'," she told me. "Have you not bought anythin' the last few days? Prices have gone up. Pay or starve, it's all one to me.

The fight to make ends meet, keeps a man upon his feet.

I saw certain things that I think maybe other kids are protected from. Like, I saw my parents struggling. I knew that we were cutting out coupons and buying dented cans because they were cheaper. And all our furniture was from the garbage. It was just - and to me because I was a kid, all that stuff was really exciting.

My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn't last but four months out of the year and most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear.

They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income... Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

I do think that it is no surprise that, economically, America is in trouble. There's been a lot of trouble out there. More and more women have found themselves doing phone sex and things like that, to help pay bills, so that they could be two-income households. They can do these short-term jobs and still pick up their kids at school, at the end of the day, and drop them off in the morning. I find it fascinating. I'm not one to judge the people in that situation, nor would I really want to.

Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.

Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes.

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.