The piano has disappeared from working-class family life, which is a shame. It’s associated with the middle classes now. Everyone in my family sang and played piano, but my parents were delighted and amazed when I became the first professional performer in the family – apart from a clog-dancer way back.
I am no longer a scientist as I stopped in 2000. Science was quite a testing place to be as a working-class woman.
We need candidates who are deeply rooted in their communities, working-class people who understand the struggles their neighbors face. That is the future of the Democratic Party.
I keep my house tidy, because then I can think clearly. I feel the same about myself. Presenting yourself well is a working-class thing – my dad was a printer, but he wore a tie most days. The ungroomed look belongs more to the middle classes.
I am a gay man who loves James Bond films and snooker – all kinds of working-class pursuits.
Undoubtedly there is a difference between people with money having access to the arts that people from working-class backgrounds don’t have, but that’s not their fault. I’m not taking anything away from these brilliant actors who are doing great stuff in Hollywood. A lot of them are my friends.
People have to recognise I’m a working-class lad. Forget what I’ve done and where I’ve been. I’m a working-class lad. I’ve come from nothing and I’ve not forgotten that.
It’s hard to get the downtrodden working-class wifey sometimes because ‘You don’t look like it’. Well, that’s weird because I grew up on a scheme in Paisley. But everyone’s got a viewpoint about what you should look like, and it’s tainted by prejudices and assumptions.
I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.
I think how veterans are treated in our country is an abomination. We don’t have the draft any more, which is why so many soldiers come from working-class – rather than middle- or high-income families. Those wealthier families aren’t affected, so they’re not agitating for change.
I have a working-class approach to music.
History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes’s reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.
As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.
Working-class Americans want a clear champion, and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.
This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.
I don’t know anyone, from any class, who’s had a perfectly easy life. I’ve met people born into wealthy families who feel like they didn’t have much emotional support, and people who come from working-class families who had loads of love but no money.
All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.
Tax expenditures for middle- and working-class Americans – like the earned income tax credit – aren’t thought of as loopholes; they’re just thought of as benefits.
There’s this working-class guilt – you don’t want to be flashy.
I was brought up a working-class Tory. I believe, to be a true socialist, you have to be a capitalist first. In my heart, I’m a socialist; in my mind, I’m a capitalist.
I have that working-class show-business blood coursing through my veins.
I am a Democrat because I believe in what the Democratic Party is supposed to be: taking care of our working-class citizens.
People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don’t have a college education, you don’t usually hear from us.
It’s like, sometimes I’ll watch a movie, and it’s got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn’t do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.
There are a lot of communities within the Asian Pacific Islander umbrella that are predominantly more working-class or lower class, and those stories haven’t been told yet, so my hope is that we see the gamut of perspectives.
I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider – very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.
My dad was part of that generation with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, of working-class actors breaking through. They’d never had an actor in the family.
When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you’re judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you’re from.
Unlike the Tory millionaires, I live in the heart of the proud working-class community of the Bogside in Derry.
In ‘Love Story,’ Oliver Barrett IV comes from generations of wealth and privilege, but when he meets working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, he can’t resist. When they marry, his father disowns him, but they struggle on in love, until she’s diagnosed with cancer and they can’t afford the costly treatments.
As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the ’70s or something.
One thing I love about America is that I’m not boxed in by my upbringing here. England is still so class-based that there are certain roles that I just won’t go for. I’m a middle-class boy and I won’t go for the scruffy working-class role, which is frustrating, and here I can play anything.
I grew up in Solihull, on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn’t feel allegiance to anything. I didn’t have working-class pride or upper-class superiority.
I think English punk died in ’79 or ’80. Maybe ’82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn’t the same as English punk. It wasn’t a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don’t think American punk ever died.
I’m a working-class guy.
I still consider myself a working-class girl and would send my kids to public school.
I come from a working-class family, and I’ve been working since I was 13, from babysitting to blueberry picking to factory work to bookstore work. And of course, being a mother and homemaker, the hardest work of all.
I come from a working-class family. They’re the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things – social, political, emotional – take place there. It’s a bottomless well for an author like me.
I came from a real working-class show business family.
I grew up in a very working-class area with a high crime rate and when I first started to break away from my social conditioning, I fell into a life of crime.
I come from a very working-class background.
I’m from a salt-of-the-earth, working-class, northern background. My dad’s a steelworker and a firefighter, and my mum is a secretary for the NHS.
I’ve never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.
I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.
I’m a working-class former apprentice electrician; at the age of 14, if you’d told me I would one day be standing on a stage with Mel Brooks, I’d have thought you were off your head. But these things can happen.
My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.
While my parents both worked full-time, we still grappled with the scourge of working-class poverty. But my entrepreneurial mother used her research skills to consult. And, along with my dad, she even ran a soul food restaurant for my great-aunt.
I came from a working-class family. My dad was in a union. I never forgot what it was like to be a private.
Children in working-class communities – like the one I grew up in – face higher rates of asthma and respiratory issues, which have a direct impact on their ability to learn.
I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that’s what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that’s what I am.
Tax cuts that actually go to working-class, middle-class people, I’m not opposed to.
I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won’t be bloody like the Russian Revolution.
