Tom Hollander Quotes

I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.

I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.

It used to be you wanted to marry up.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

My parents spent a lot of money so I wouldn't sound like I came from Queens. I went to speech class.

I was always told at school I was posh, then I came to London, and here I'm told I have a country accent.

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

Class is something I know about. I've lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.

When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you're judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you're from.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

You may be the most liberal, Liberal Englishman, and yet you cannot fail to see the categorical difference between the responsible and the irresponsible classes.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

People assume I'm posh because I'm one of the acting dames. I grew up in Tottenham and didn't used to speak like I do now.

I remember my parents being really on me about speaking in a certain way when I was young, I think because they came from a class that aspired to talk like that.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.