John Burnside Quotes

I was actually born in Chicago, and then when I was a toddler, my parents moved to Philadelphia.

For the longest time I was afraid I'd have to keep on working at the factories. There was a steel mill and a pottery; if you didn't go to college, you went to work in those places.

My family moved to Buffalo, New York in 1940 where I was raised.

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.

I was born in our Chembur house in Mumbai, where we lived for five years after which we shifted to our Lokhandwala house.

I was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and we moved when I was 4.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

I was born in West Plains, and we lived here till I was one. Then my dad needed to get a job, so we moved to the St. Louis area. I lived in St. Charles, on the Missouri River, till I was 15.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

Slowly but surely the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class—a middle class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working class but whose ambitions are far broader than their parents and grandparents.

In a thriving economy, birth need not be destiny.

$5 a day was what Mr. Ford said, and Negroes came hundreds of miles to line up outside his employment offices.

I went to high school in a steel town in Pennsylvania.

In the 1960s, if you could save $500, you had enough to move to another city and start a new life.

My great-grandfather was prime minister of Canada, and I had a very Edwardian upbringing. It was a beautiful, romantic way of growing up, until the family lost its money. And I decided to be bad and rough and find the streets rather than the gates.

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

I remembered moving from Sacramento to Los Angeles with my mum when I was seven and my sister was three or four.

I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal 'cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.

I spent grades one through nine in Baltimore City, leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of education I was receiving.

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer - or maybe president.

In my life, I have learned that most people want the same thing. They are not driven by class resentment. What they want most is to make a better life for themselves and their families - and to know that the opportunities for their children will be better than they were for themselves.

I was born in Sacramento but moved to Los Angeles with my mom and my little sister when I was seven.

Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I'd wind up in a soup line there.

I came from a middle-class family. My dad was a professor; my mom was a nurse. I didn't come from money, and I didn't come from circles of power. I didn't come from the country club; I came from the town park.