D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people.

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.

The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them.

The world is an infinitely fascinating, tragic and humorous place.

We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

At this very moment in time there will be people making, breaking relationships, regretting deeply what they've done, and causing hurt, but that is a fact of life, and if we weren't full of emotion, we'd be automatons, and I don't think people want us to be that.

Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

We are made of emotions, we are all looking for emotions, it's only a question of finding the way to experience them.

I love my cross-sectioned, cross-cultural audience. Some of them are doing better than the average guy, but my audience has always been people who are struggling to stay in the middle class.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.

I know that I've had a very fortunate life, but also I think my job as an actor is to connect emotionally to human beings.

For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.

It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.

Let's be honest: Kerry has no idea what it is to be even a middle-class white in this country.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

I hate the fact that he's doing that, but the fact is that, you know what, that's a human being, though. He let his guard down one day to me, a friend.

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.