Ian Rankin Quotes

Honestly, I grew up in pretty modest circumstances. We were a middle-class family.

My family was lower middle class, and my parents both worked, so we couldn't take proper vacations. We'd go for three days to Santa Barbara or to the desert, so my first real vacation came was when I was 12, when friends of my parents were taking their kids away. We went to Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park in Arizona and Utah.

I didn't have parents I could take a million dollars from. We were a lower-class family.

I come from a working class family. We barely had anything.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

My parents were not professionals. They were products of the Depression.

My upbringing was very straightforward suburban working class upbringing.

I grew up in a very working-class family and also a very fundamentalist Christian family. So, we didn't have access to the arts in the house in any form other than the Sunday funnies.

I was on significant financial aid, an only child, with parents who didn't have much living in North Carolina.

I come from a very working class background. My dad worked in a factory for 40 years. We all put ourselves through school.

I don't come from money.

A little bit about my family: We didn't really come from much, and we didn't take family trips to California, so my first trip to California was actually my first day of school.

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

My parents didn't have any money.

In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future; but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.

Both my mother and father worked for everything that they had.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

I come from a simple background, so I couldn't call my father and say, 'Come pay my bills,' so I had to get out there and work.

I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money.

I come from the lower middle class, originally. We didn't have anything.

I didn't grow up wealthy. We couldn't even afford spaghetti sauce when I was first born, but my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.

My mother - it's not one of those waxing-poetic kind of things - she literally worked two or three jobs most of her life. So I personally experienced that, even though I had these great friends and associations who had unlimited amounts of money. That juxtaposition was an interesting one.

When I was born, my dad was a scaffolder, and my mum worked in a chip shop. Then my mum taught herself how to be a hairdresser and ended up with her own salon; my dad became a postman and then a counter clerk. Our first house didn't have a bathroom.

I grew up on a council estate in south London; my dad was a bus driver and my mum sewed clothes to bring in extra money. My parents worked hard and were able to save up and buy a home for our family.

When I started, I had nothing. Because my family was really, really, really poor.