Middle-Class Upbringing Quotes

Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.

What has worked for America is not caring about how the rich are doing, or the politics of envy. What's worked for America is growth. Growth is the reason why I had a very nice middle class upbringing with parents who never went to college.

My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman.

I always loved performing, but my parents were very practical, middle-class Jewish people.

My ex-husband is very involved in raising our beautiful children. We're very lucky because we both grew up in working families in middle America. We're on the same page that way.

I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31. I didn't sleep on people's couches.

I was obliged to play the piano, like middle-class children are. I didn't start to love it until I was 14.

I don't feel that I've had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

People think that I grew up going to Barneys for my back-to-school clothes. I went to the Gap. We lived in a nice house on a cul-de-sac, but it wasn't a mansion. We didn't have a butler or a maid.