Paul Walker Quotes

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

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.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.

One of the nicest things about receiving the accolade of Australia is that, previously, the knighthood was historically for what was termed 'the establishment.' Now, this is an accolade for somebody who comes from a working-class background. Someone whose father was a truck driver and decided to buy a truck.

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

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

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.

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

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad's union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

Labor, in fact, to Spanish pride, was the badge of inferiority, to be escaped in every possible way. It is the general complaint of the publicists of the seventeenth century that every one sought to gain a livelihood in the public service or in the Church, and no one to earn it by honest work.

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.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

I've been with all walks of life... All people from all status.

I'm not part of a middle-class establishment. I'm working class, and I grew up in a council house.

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.

I like a nice cross section of society in my restaurants - the stars, the toffs, the working guy.

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

Class is a big issue here. And some people get picked on more than others. I think we probably do. I mean, it doesn't help that we wear waistcoats and tweed the whole time. But there is a reverse snobbishness in England towards that sort of stuff. And I think that's one of the reasons we really enjoy America, 'cos we're classless.

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.