Debbie Reynolds Quotes

I spent the first three years of my life with my parents, grandmother and two aunties in a tiny council house in Glasgow.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.

I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.

I grew up in Georgia where my parents, little brother Zurab and I shared a flat with my paternal grandparents and two uncles in the capital, Tbilisi. Times were hard and the country was racked by civil war.

My mother really struggled when we were young. She was on food stamps and welfare. Looking back, I know we didn't have a lot, but I never felt I was at a loss for anything.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

I know what it's like to struggle for cash. When I went to drama school, I worked as a chambermaid to make ends meet.

I grew up in an underprivileged home.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.

We weren't dirt poor, but there was no spare money kicking around. While it was very much understood that the way to a better life was through education, books were a luxury we couldn't afford. But when I was six, we actually moved opposite the central library, and that became my home from home.

I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children.

My father died when I was young, and after he did, my mother had it tough. Very tough.

I met my wife, I had no money, I had nothing, and I started my family without really, my career was nowhere, but I had these other businesses, I had these things I was doing to be able to afford a small home.

I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up very poor- seven people, four rooms. My dad had no education.

As a child, I was raised with my grandmother, alongside all my cousins, and the kitchen was always full.

I was called McG since the day I was born because we were broke and there were three Joes in the house.

My parents raised me and my six siblings with little money... but lots of love.

I grew up near King's Cross station in London, living in an apartment block where my dad was a caretaker.

When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.

We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we'd pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off.

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

I can't dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by.

Parenting is something that I got early, because when you grow up without a father being there, and you see a single mother struggle to feed the kids, you do not want to put your own blood through that.