Roz Chast Quotes

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

I'm a pack rat. There's only a couple pairs of tights I've worn throughout my career that I don't have. I save everything.

I wasn't a hoarder, but I was on my way. I went to thrift stores and never didn't buy something. A lot of cat figurines, needlepoint, afghans. Grandma stuff, I suppose.

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

I can be very messy and disorganized. And I don't throw away anything.

I have forty-six cookbooks. I have sixty-eight takeout menus from four restaurants. I have one hundred and sixteen soy sauce packets. I have three hundred and eighty-two dishes, bowls, cups, saucers, mugs and glasses. I eat over the sink. I have five sinks, two with a view.

My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

I save everything. I have these carefully organized file boxes. Somewhere in there is a section of the 'New York Times' where I wrote 'The Border Guard' in the margin.

I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

It's tough for me to get rid of clothes. I grew up in a household with a limited budget and we really had to make our nice clothes last, and so now I'll get free pairs of shoes and this, that and the other and I'll be like, 'Oh great!'; even though it stresses me out that I don't have enough room to put them, I can't throw them away.

As a kid I collected stamps, pebbles on the beach, anything. I liked to have at least 10 of something.

I'm a hoarder. For me, documentation has always been key, and I've kept everything from my past.

There's a lot in my closet. I've been collecting things since I was five. I'm definitely a pack rat. I'm not a hoarder, but I'm definitely a pack rat. I will keep anything if I have a memory in it or a good moment.

I'm not at the hoarder stage, but there are two or three storage units here and there. I have things that a lot of people put a lot of heart and soul into, a lot of mental energy. I'm good at keeping those things. When it comes to pop culture, as you move through this fast lane, you wonder where it all goes and how you can hold onto it.

We lived near a supermarket, and whatever they threw away, we would get it, and my mother would make soup. Or she would get a big can of lard, a big can of meal, a big can of flour, a big can of beans, and fix the same meal for months.

I try not to look at my old stuff or my new stuff, really. I'm not a fan.

My mother kept every single thing that she ever got in her life.

My grandmother would hide bread for when maybe another war would come. You had to be ready.

Men fill up their heads and drawers and sheds with stuff from their teenage years.

I'm a collector - I collect everything. I can't throw things away. For some reason I think I'm going to need tiny wooden teddy bears with their arms hacked off.

I can remember when pants were pants. You wore them for twenty years, then you cut them down for pan scrubs. Or quilts.

I know not how it is, but during a voyage I collect books as a ship does barnacles.