Jane McDonald Quotes

One of the nicest things about receiving the accolade of Australia is that, previously, the knighthood was historically for what was termed 'the establishment.' Now, this is an accolade for somebody who comes from a working-class background. Someone whose father was a truck driver and decided to buy a truck.

My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.

In some ways, people forget about average working people, and how they live their lives.

I'm a working class lad. So at 25, and with no-one in our family having any theatrical inclination, when I said, 'I'm going to scratch all that and become an actor,' I may as well have said I was going to be a Premiership footballer for the chance I'd have.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

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 never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

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

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

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 dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad's union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.

Rick Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner. His dad was the manager of a V.A. hospital.

I was born May 31, 1911, in Paris. My parents owned a small cheese shop, and my maternal grandfather was a carpentry worker. I thus came from what is commonly known as the working class.

I'm not the least bit polished, I come from a blue collar background and I never thought I could feel comfortable around the English.

I'm from working-class, blue-collar America, and I don't believe that people in that socioeconomic strata wait until they're 40 to have children.

The breadth of work that's possible is wider and deeper for someone who looks like me in the States than it is in the U.K.

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.

Being working class, my parents thought, 'Ian's going to uni, the first in the family,' and I'd do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, 'Why am I doing this?' The only thing I was interested in was books and literature.

I grew up in a working class family. People thought I might go work at a mill. My mom wanted me to learn how to lay carpet because she was concerned about my future. Nobody had high hopes for me. But I was a hustler.

All of the guys I know from Jersey held onto this feeling of, 'We're always just working.'

I come from a working class background, it wasn't easy for me at all, but I worked hard.

I was brought up working class in east London with my own thoughts and my own beliefs and, when I began playing, I got involved in charity work and expanded those beliefs.