Laurie Simmons Quotes

I am fairly classless because it is very difficult to class someone who comes from a mixed marriage.

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.

In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.

It's hard to get the downtrodden working-class wifey sometimes because 'You don't look like it'. Well, that's weird because I grew up on a scheme in Paisley. But everyone's got a viewpoint about what you should look like, and it's tainted by prejudices and assumptions.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

There aren't that many people walking about who are a total class stereotype.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Not that I am hugely working class, but in the U.K. I'm always perceived, casting-wise, as being working class.

You can take the girl out of the estate, but you can't take the estate out of the girl.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

My folks were English . . . we were too poor to be British.

It is no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.

My roots, my background and the way I act is working class, but it would be hypsocritical to say I'm anything else than middle class now.

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.

I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

In gay culture hookups are a way of escaping your class.

You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

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.

In my mind, there's nothing wrong with it. I don't instinctively know what's wrong with it. There is a language of the ghetto. There is a language of the barrio. And it's not good. There is an attitude. There is a behavior. There is a mindset and we wouldn't anybody to be stuck in it.

A working class hero is something to be.