George Saunders Quotes

Since my worldview has expanded, I don't consider myself working class anymore, and I'm attracted to playing characters who go through a similar evolution.

I still consider myself a working-class girl and would send my kids to public school.

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.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

I don't ever think of myself as coming from a particular class because my father was working class but made his living as a newspaper foreign correspondent - someone of no fixed abode, as he used to say - who was as comfortable dining with the Mountbattens in India as he was having a pint with the boys. He was very gregarious.

I think the country will get behind someone who comes from a working-class background, who truly epitomizes the American Dream.

When my parents met, my mother was a waitress and my father was a dockyard worker. They were part of that post-war better-yourself generation, so they both went to night school.

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.

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.

I'm self-made. I always wanted to make myself a better person, because I was not educated. But that was my dream - to have class.

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 a thriving economy, birth need not be destiny.

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

You'd be surprised how many politicians have a working class background but they get it beaten out of them.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

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.

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.

Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.

I'm proud of my middle-class background because that's how I've grown up. I have my values and sensibilities.

I think Ant and I were ambitious because of where we come from. Both of us are from working-class families on council estates in Newcastle.

It's a very working-class thing, to get where you want and then not feel worthy.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

I'm a working class lad.