Maxine Peake Quotes

At various points, I've had a massive chip on me shoulder. I had fights about me accent with loads of those fellers you get from third-class public schools. They used to think I was speaking German.

There is the idea that there's a section of society, these working-class tradesmen, are driving around and they all think the same. Everybody who has tools in their vehicle have all the exact same thoughts: it's incredibly patronising isn't it?

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

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.

My parents' parents were regular working-class people. I ended up speaking in a certain way, and one gets sidelined into doing certain parts. I think that is really quite narrow-minded.

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.

It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

Not that I am hugely working class, but in the U.K. I'm always perceived, casting-wise, as being working class.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

Categorizing people economically and hating them because you think they're this way is a prejudice.

Discounting the ineffably repetitive homophobic barbs that I receive most days, Twitter trolls' most common gripe against me appears to be that I am 'posh.' Contrary to their unshakeable view, I was not born into the upstairs world.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

Class still matters in Britain today.

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.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.