Shia LaBeouf Quotes

I was broke until I was 40. Really broke. I could get by, but I had nothing. No health insurance, so if something happened I was screwed. I was lucky my parents had money and my brother was willing to support me for a long time. Once I started doing standup, I had an income, and that was amazing to me.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

I come from a family of working women, my mum went to work two weeks after I was born - my parents had no money, there was no choice.

When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.

I had fun doing a lot of low-budget movies and web series. And I got back into stand-up where I started.

I was at college doing performing arts, and just spending all my time mucking about, and the lecturers thought I would be pretty good at stand-up, so I gave it a whirl.

Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.

I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.

My grandmother adopted me for a while, and I was bouncing around a bit. I was always helped by the PTA and church groups with food and Christmas presents. It's a hard cycle to break, because when you don't have the resources, it's almost impossible.

When you get started in comedy, you're at the bottom of the totem pole. Not only are you not getting paid at these open mics. You're actually paying to do them.

I was from this small town, and my parents were poor.

Well, I started trying stand-up before I joined Google, actually. And then I went broke because that's what happens when you try stand-up comedy. You're actually paying to perform.

I first started as an actor, but there was no money in it, which is why I drifted into comedy.

I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.

I started to earn money because we didn't have money.

I considered myself a professional comedian because the club would pay me $20.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

Both my parents recognized early on that I wanted to do something in comedy, and they were really supportive. They're the ones who bought me Steve Martin records and let me watch R-rated comedies long before they probably should have.

One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.

I first did stand-up when I was 17, and then I passed out fliers for a comedy club (in New York City) and I got onstage whenever I could. And musical theater went out the window as soon as I started doing stand-up.

It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.

I have never forgotten how the deprivation of work erodes human beings, those not working and those related to them. And from that time on, I loathed an economic that could put a huge part of its workforce on the streets with no compunction.