Sue Townsend Quotes

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.

I still consider myself working class. I know my circumstances have changed dramatically since I was growing up back in Birkenhead.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.

I grew up working class in Atlanta.

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

I come from a working-class background in Queens, New York.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

I think that's always something when you're working class, when you're aware of things that you haven't had; there are moments when you question yourself, definitely.

The thing is with boxers we don't come from Cambridge and places like that, we come from council estates. So in boxing it's very, very hard.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

My mom grew up in poverty in Oklahoma - like Dust Bowl, nine people in one room kind of place - and the way she got out of poverty was through education. My dad grew up without a dad, with very little and he also made his way out through education.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

I come from a very working-class background.

Money can't buy poverty.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

I come from a very working-class background.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

Other families who are poor do what they can to get out of it. My mother did not. She did not utilise her resources. She had a degree. There was something she could have done, but she actively, purposely refused that so we could have this absolutely authentic experience of the worst of capitalism: 'See? Look how bad capitalism is.'

I grew up with no money. No money. I always struggled and had the sense that there was this other class of people who went to college - this was when I was younger.

I'm definitely working class, and I still believe in those values. I know that losing everything would not be an unfamiliar feeling. Meaning, if you don't have it anymore, you didn't have it to begin with.

My mom came from such humble beginnings and especially my dad as well. He didn't go to university.