Quotes About Resourcefulness

Producing suits me because I have a business mind and a business sensibility. I was a street hustler. I did whatever it took. I sold whatever I could sell. I'm a good organiser.

I have been down and out, living in Brooklyn, no money even for a subway, no food whatsoever. Like, I remember just sitting in my room all day - even my television wasn't working!

I didn't have money to eat when I was 21. When I was short on cash, I would sometimes scam food from fast food places. I'd go into fast food chains and pretend I was from a movie studio, tell them they didn't send us the right order and demand they fix it. I've tried to make that right whenever I could.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

The essential quality of an animal is that it seeks its own living, whereas a vegetable has its living brought to it.

Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, 'Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don't go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.'

The rules of survival never change, whether you're in a desert or in an arena.

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.

I used the principles of Kickstarter to make 'She's Gotta Have It.' We filmed that in 1985 to 1986. The final cost was $175,000. I didn't have that money. It was friends, grants, donations. We saved our bottles for the nickel deposit.

A neighborhood friend showed me how it was possible to go to a camera shop and pick up chemicals for pennies... literally... and develop your own film and make prints.

My mother's dad dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician. Anything that was broken, he could fix. Anybody anywhere in our community knew that if there was a problem, Carl was there to fix it.

I'm not afraid of problem-solving. There is always a way.

I credit my mom with inspiring in me a love of design, matched by her creative problem-solving abilities. This is a woman who could find an old, discarded piece of furniture, bring it home and turn it into something fabulous.

I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS... a little documentary.

When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. I did 'Mars et Avril' for only 2.3 million.

When I first started, there really was no beauty guru community. I didn't have the right production resources. I had to learn how to edit. I didn't even have beauty products. I had to go out and buy them myself because beauty brands didn't even know what a beauty guru was.

I'm like a magpie. I use lots of different things to build a character.

Sometimes you need to find ways to win games in different ways.

I spent a long time on my first movie, which was the sequel to a short film that I did called 'Carne.' And I had no money. I shot it over a period of three years, a bit like David Lynch directed 'Eraserhead.'

I learned to get what I wanted through any means necessary, and sometimes that means you have to get your hands dirty.

I take pleasure in discovering resourcefulness inside me.

As an actor, you need to use everything at your disposal.

You don't need to buy expensive cosmetics; almost anything will do if you know how to apply it.