James McAvoy Quotes

I'm from a pretty working-class background, and I really worked hard in my life to eradicate those parts of myself that were stupidly trapped in that world.Those of us who come up that way made a series of choices to benefit ourselves and make ourselves more generous and open.

I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

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.

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.

'Billy Elliot' embodies the idea that anyone can achieve anything regardless of their socio-economic background.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 no different to other working class players.

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

You know, I didn't grow up in a cultured household. We were all highly intelligent, but we were common, simple people. We weren't activists, none of that.

Having grown up a trailer park kid on welfare and food stamps, becoming jaded is impossible, although now I make a good living, which I'm not ashamed of; when you've been poor, it never leaves you.

I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

That's one thing you Americans take for granted, you know? That you can grow up, you know, not so good circumstances, and you can move. Just because you are born in rural Arkansas, whatever, that doesn't define who you are.

I come from a blue collar background.

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