Jean Kerr Quotes

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

We're going to start seeing that it's actually less about race and more about class in the future. As much as we complain about the establishment discriminating against black people, we're going to start seeing that more of us are already in the establishment.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

I hate when people call me a socialite because you have to have money to be a socialite, which I don't have.

Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor.

You don't want money to make you a social freak where you can only hang out with rich people.

You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.

'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

I don't think that the rich should be attacked. There's nothing wrong in being rich.

Nobody likes being around poor people, especially poor people.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

When you are around people who have money, you realise money isn't that impressive, it's about your class, morals and how you conduct yourself.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.