I will say that the environment I grew up in was not the most progressive.
The people who perpetrated the terror of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings are something different because these people were obviously not desperate and poor refugee dwellers. They were middle class, educated enough to speak English, to be able to go to flight school, to come to America, to live in Florida.
I didn't come from a traditional Tory background; it was urban and metropolitan.
I didn't see any Broadway till I was in my late twenties.
People have to recognise I'm a working-class lad. Forget what I've done and where I've been. I'm a working-class lad. I've come from nothing and I've not forgotten that.
People always assume I went to public school, which I didn't, so that immediately puts me somewhere.
These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.
I wasn't raised to make history. In high school and family, no one around me was politically involved, and few of my friends planned to attend college or even thought about it.
I came out of a family background that involved itself with people.
There's no such thing as losing touch. You can take me out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of me.
I grew up with Chief Keef and Lil Reese. We all lived in the same environment, I went to school with them and everything.
I was brought up working class in east London with my own thoughts and my own beliefs and, when I began playing, I got involved in charity work and expanded those beliefs.
Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.
The first time I had a baked potato, I was eight years old at a friend's house. Most white kids growing up have a baked potato every day. I didn't even know what to do with it, how to open it. I was the only white kid in high school eating octopus.
I went to private school, but I've got family from North Carolina.
While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.
At first, I didn't hang out with celebrity kids. That wasn't the way I was brought up. I went to a run-of-the-mill Catholic primary school when we first moved to L.A. But then I went to a high school where there were lots of 'industry' children. Those weren't my best friends and I've never set out to make myself a part of that scene.
The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing.
Many offenders have had immensely difficult upbringings and do not have the support of loving families and friends.
I think you can find some rationales for that if we look at the background out of which he came. Martin [Luther King] had come out of a highly competitive, black, middle-class background.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class environment, usually the lone minority among my classmates.
Most of all, however, critics of black conservatives say we've forgotten where we came from. I may forget a federal budget number or, God forbid, to set the alarm clock for my weekly 6 a.m. flight to Washington, but I know exactly where I came from.
The factors that are the long-term influences on opinion in this country are education, social and economic background, and religion. Those are the great constants. People's basic attitudes change very little.
I'm from a council estate myself, and the biggest release we had as kids was football. That's where all the great players learn their trade - as kids having a kickabout.
I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.
