Martin Amis Quotes

It is surprising how few references in our politics there are to the underclass as compared by the middle class.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

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

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

For a number of years, I've wondered if people like us are the forgotten. We're not the poor, and we're not the rich. We're not the very young or the aged. We're the average American family.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

I believe Colorado needs representation from a conservative who has worked his way through the types of obstacles with which nearly all middle-class and lower-income people struggle.

The middle-class ladder has rungs that no longer exist for many trying to climb higher. Instead, for too many, in too many places, their chore is simply trying to hang on.

I grew up poor, black, and working class.

I grew up working class in Atlanta.

The thing is with boxers we don't come from Cambridge and places like that, we come from council estates. So in boxing it's very, very hard.

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.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

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.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

I make films about working class people.