J. G. Ballard Quotes

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.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

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 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.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Class still matters in Britain today.

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.

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.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

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

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

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

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

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

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.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.