Melvyn Bragg Quotes

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

People have to recognise I'm a working-class lad. Forget what I've done and where I've been. I'm a working-class lad. I've come from nothing and I've not forgotten that.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know.

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

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

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

You can take the girl out of the estate, but you can't take the estate out of the girl.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.

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.

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

I come from a very working-class background.

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

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

Class is something I know about. I've lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

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

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

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

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.