Jane Wagner Quotes

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

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

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.

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

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 don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

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

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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