Steff: Money really means nothing to me. Do you think I’d treat my parents’ house this way if it did?
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Vivian: I was in here yesterday. You wouldn’t wait on me. You work on commission right? Big mistake. Big. Huge! I have to go shopping now.
Store manager: Just how obscene an amount of cash are we talking about here? Profane or really offensive?
Edward: Really offensive.
Store manager: I like him so much.
It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.
Cosmo Castorini: There are three kinds of pipe. There is what you have, which is garbage and you can see where that’s gotten you. Then there’s bronze, which is very good unless something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. And then there’s copper, which is the only pipe I use. It costs money. It costs money because it saves money.
Jane: Do you know what this is?
Jesse: It’s a whole lot of cheddar.
Jane: This is freedom. This is saying, “I can go anywhere I want. I can be anybody.” What do you want to be? Where do you want to go? South America? Europe? Australia?
Jesse: Is New Zealand part of Australia?
Jane: New Zealand is New Zealand.
Jesse: Right on. New Zealand. That’s where they made Lord of the Rings. I say we just move there, yo. I mean, you can do your art. Right? Like, you can paint the local castles and shit. And I can be a bush pilot.
Jesse: Yo, I get I shouldn’t call, but I’m in a situation over here, and I need my money.
Walter: I just gave you $600.
Jesse: Yeah, and thanks, Daddy Warbucks, but that was before my housing situation went completely testicular on me, okay?
Dan Rydell: Come with us.
Casey McCall: Where?
Dan Rydell: El Perro Fumando.
Casey McCall: “The Smoking Dog”?
Dan Rydell: Yes.
Casey McCall: Why?
Dan Rydell: If you wear something blue, you get two dollars off a giant blue margarita.
Casey McCall: You know, I make a pretty good living. I can actually afford to wear what I want and pay full price.
Dan Rydell: I’m not promoting the economic upside as much as I am the opportunity to drink something giant and blue.
Homer: A hundred bucks? For a comic book? Who drew it, Micha-ma-langelo?
Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic.
Go ahead, cut education, federal funding for municipal projects, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment benefits. That may make you feel like you’re striking a blow for “ending the culture of dependency,” but kids still have to learn, aging classrooms still need to be renovated, books still need to be bought, teachers still need to be paid, bridges and roads still need to be built and repaired, and poor and out-of-work people will still get sick and hungry and need diapers. Having the feds stop paying to solve these problems doesn’t make the problems go away; it just transfers the onus of solving these problems to the states.
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake … but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
Cooper: We couldn’t afford to pay you much, say, ten dollars a day?
Louise: Ten dollars!
Gene: I could start saving for my Porsche Cayenne!
Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
Blane: You couldn’t buy her, though, that’s what’s killing you, isn’t it? Steff? That’s it, Steff. She thinks you’re shit. And deep down, you know she’s right.
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of “rags to riches” were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.
Some folks wouldn’t even speak when they passed me on the street. Then MGM came to town to film Intruder in the Dust, and that made some difference because I’d brought money into Oxford. But it wasn’t until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn’t understand my books, but they could understand thirty thousand dollars.
Andrew: I think adults are just children who owe money.
Algernon: Stop him? Me? It’s more than my job’s worth to stop him once he gets like this. He’s out to rule the world, if he can get a government grant.
Ozzie: Gee, the museum director seemed miffed.
Claire: How’d you feel if someone broke your dinosaur?
Ozzie: I never had one. We were too poor.
I decided that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn’t get the money, then you didn’t have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.
Love is an ocean of emotions, entirely surrounded by expenses.
Holly Golightly: I’ll tell you one thing, Fred, darling… I’d marry you for your money in a minute. Would you marry me for my money?
Paul Varjak: In a minute.
Holly Golightly: I guess it’s pretty lucky neither of us is rich, huh?
Paul Varjak: Yeah.
Never spend your money before you have it.
The only thing I like about rich people is their money.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
You can’t buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.
Aaron: They told me they’d keep me because they could plug me into any story and my salary was in line.
Ernie: The cost-efficient reporter.
Aaron: So I quit.
If I paid $3 or $4 for a cigar, first I’d sleep with it.
The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
I believe in saving money. I believe in having a house. I believe in keeping things clean. I believe in exercising. Slow and steady is a very good thing for me. It works for me.
Pennies don’t fall from heaven, they have to be earned here on earth.
Phil: Everyone throws up at school once in a while. If I had a nickel for every time I threw up in class, you know how much money I would have?
Luke: Thirty-five cents.
Phil: That’s right.
Lou: The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do.
