Patti Smith Quotes

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

My mother was a cleaning lady all her life.

My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.

I've worked in construction, in a factory sewing clothes. I also sold flowers and doughnuts - just odd jobs to try to make 10 pesos, which is equivalent to 20 cents.

I started working when I was 13, picking up trash, bagging ice.

From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

My parents were blue-collar.

I talk to the guy who busted his butt all week to buy a color TV, and the woman who's raising her kids, the people I owe a debt to. I'm talking to people in hotel rooms, lonesome people.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old.

I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.

I admire my mother for being a single mum. It's ridiculously hard.

My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family.

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.

The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.

Carl Barks was born in Merrill, Oregon, in 1901, grew up in a farming family, and eventually held a number of blue-collar jobs. He knew what it was to be poor and to work hard for a living.

Let's start off with my father being a mailman. So I understand the concerns of all the folks across this country, some of whom having trouble, you know, making ends meet.

I started working when I was 9 or 10.

There was a time when you could make a living by the sweat of your brow. Those days are over!

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

I come from a blue-collar family, and I'm just glad for the work.

I did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth.

I've been working since I'm 9 years old.