Connor Paolo Quotes

My family didn't really have newspapers at home or talk about politics - my family are not political. They were too busy getting on with it - working, looking after kids, trying to pay off the mortgage, all that stuff.

Anyone can relate to struggle, whether you're European or Asian. Anyone can relate to having to get up and go to work and eat.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

My father worked in the Post Office. A lot of double shifts. All his friends were in the same situation - truck drivers, taxi cab drivers, grocery clerks. Blue collar guys punching the clock and working long, hard hours. The thought that sustained them was the one at the center of the American dream.

I'm a working stiff, baby, just like everybody else.

It's an unusual situation for me to be working and making a living.

Not all Republicans are rich, dress in three-piece suits, and have $200 haircuts. I'm somebody who's lived from paycheck to paycheck. I'm focusing on my blue-collar roots - I've worked side by side with union people.

I come from a blue-collar family. My father worked at the American Can Company as a mechanic. He broke his back and was disabled, and the first memory I have of him is in the hospital. My mother was a working mother - she had two jobs. Everybody in the house had to help out.

I think we're a working man's band.

My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

I wanted to join the Army when football failed. That was my only realistic form of making an honest living.

I hope we can get back to what I call the kitchen table. Everyday issues that people are really worried about and focused on.

I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone who's busy and has too many children, like my mother.

None of my characters are rich or famous, and the situations they find themselves in could happen to anyone.

In order to make any kind of living, you cannot afford to say no. If anything comes up, you've got to take it; you've got to grab it with both hands because security is really not there.

Receiving far less attention are the working class heroes, who go about their solitary work routines with quiet dignity, come home from another grueling day, yet still find time to interact with their children.

If you work, you should not be poor.

[In the 1924 presidential election, campaign contributions from workers to the senator were not as high as had been hoped for by the campaign staff. Those pay checks are all that stand between starvation for those workers and their families. You are asking too much of them.

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

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.

The people that make this country work, the people who pay on their mortgages, the people getting up and going to work, striving in this recession to not participate in it, they're not the enemy. They're the people that hire you. They're the people that are going to give you a job.

What you learn growing up in a place like Buffalo is that your job isn't just your paycheck, it's your identity. It doesn't just give you dollars, it gives you dignity.

The fact that you're successful doesn't mean that you can't relate to working people.

We need a brand as a party that says we're the party that are going to help working-class people, white people, black people, brown people, gay people, straight people, improve opportunity for them to grow their wages, to have security, economic security.