Jimmy Scott Quotes

From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.

I think that I'm lucky in that, even at levels where I, by and large, wasn't making enough money to sustain my life, I worked as a male nanny, I waited tables and did what I had to, to keep doing theater and acting.

When I first came out, I was a film student, and my mom sewed clothes. I was already doing a million things then, whatever it took to survive. If I had to braid someone's hair to get one pound for my lunch money, that's what I did.

I've worked in construction, in a factory sewing clothes. I also sold flowers and doughnuts - just odd jobs to try to make 10 pesos, which is equivalent to 20 cents.

Put paying your dues and all that puts so much into being a success. You have an understanding of what it's about, being on your own for three or four years and living day to day on $3, or living in an apartment with no electricity.

It's wrong that so many hardworking people - people working full-time, or even multiple jobs - need public assistance just to survive.

My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn't. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life.

I lived below the poverty line when I was young and starting out as a writer. But my wife and I kept trying to do things better, as anyone with ambition does. But just because you're trying doesn't mean you're always going to succeed.

I worked check-to-check, worked in dead-end jobs my whole life before I got into stand-up, and even during stand-up, I was working at a retail job and Starbucks, all those places.

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

I've worked as a labourer, driven taxis and school buses, and been a car mechanic - whatever I could do just to get by. But it does mean that I know a little bit about a lot of things.

I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.

I experienced firsthand what it means to be poor, what it means to go hungry, and that, I think, may be the reason, the root cause of why I'm able to work so hard, even these days.

In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.

And of course I didn't make any money from stand up for years, so I had temp jobs. That was the way I made money.

My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family.

There were days when my father didn't have money for food, and we slept hoping the next day something could be got from work.

But we did the best we could and in the end some of us had to get day jobs and start fresh.

I've had to do all kinds of jobs to pay the rent. I've even worked in a Cornish tin mine.

My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.

The caddies are so overlooked out here, and I remember the tough times I had making ends meet when I used to carry the bag.

I was almost ready to call it quits - sick of doing a job and then being back on the unemployment line and trying to make ends meet. But I loved acting and didn't know what else to do.

When I first started fighting, it wasn't the easiest thing. I didn't have all the money in the world. I was eating Subway once in a while, some packets of oatmeal here and there. It wasn't that bad, but it's because I was fortunate and had good people there to support me.

After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.

Poverty makes you work really hard.