John Cheever Quotes

My roots, my background and the way I act is working class, but it would be hypsocritical to say I'm anything else than middle class now.

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Because I came from the working class, I still identify with them. I don't identify with the middle class.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

... it's hard to be politically conscious and upwardly mobile at the same time.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

I'm a working-class person, working with class.

I don't think you can get any more working class than me. Everyone seems posh to me.

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

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

My background is that I came from a middle class family, and I think those values stay where ever you go.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

… an army of Gatsbys wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust.

I'm a class mongrel.

Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.

Since I still think of myself as a middle class guy, people get to see that side of me in films like 'Middle Class Abbayi.'

I grew up in the middle class.