Anthony McCarten Quotes

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspaper, always watched the news, discussed it all the time.

I didn't grow up reading magazines; I was very much in an environment where that would have been deemed trivial, frivolous.

I come from a working-class family of seven children.

I grew up in a household that was a labor household. My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver. My mother was a secretary. Neither of them got through high school. But they worked hard and they gave me very, very important opportunities to go to school, get a good education.

Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science.

I came from rather humble beginnings.

Being the family's literate one, my wife doesn't watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she'll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart.

Honestly, I grew up in pretty modest circumstances. We were a middle-class family.

I thought my dad was out of work, because my friends had fathers with briefcases who'd go off somewhere with bow ties on. But my father would finish breakfast and go back to his room.

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

In some families, parents don't read or don't have the money to spend on books.

Encourage your children to read more and watch television less.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

A little bit about my family: We didn't really come from much, and we didn't take family trips to California, so my first trip to California was actually my first day of school.

I grew up on Chicago's South Side in a working-poor family, so I watched everything on television. It was like my window on the world. But we also went to the movies pretty regularly - mostly on Tuesdays, because that was Ladies Night, and my mom could get in for free.

I came from an intellectual Parisian family. My father was a watchmaker; my mother was a housewife. We discussed politics, art, sculpture - never fashion.

My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world.

'Speechless' is first and foremost a show about a family that doesn't have a ton of money, but they move into a really crappy house in a really nice neighborhood so their kids can go to a nice school.

I come from a lower-middle-class family and used to stay in a housing board colony.

I don't come from a well-off family. We're very middle-class, lower-middle-class, so that's something I cherish.

My parents both worked; I was a 'latchkey kid.' We were lower-middle class, and they did everything that they could to give me anything I wanted, within reason. We were not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but being an adopted kid, I think we had a different connotation. My parents tried extra hard, I think.

In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren't educated past high school, and the only book in our house was a 'Reader's Digest' condensed book. Can you imagine?

As for my role models... you know, I'm an immigrant, so we didn't grow up with too much TV. My parents were like, 'You must read your books.'