Upwardly Mobile Quotes

I didn't come from a traditional Tory background; it was urban and metropolitan.

I'm not of the manor born; I've never felt entitled in that way. I just came to Hollywood to be an actor. All that lifestyle stuff is something to be managed.

When did it something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America?

When I was born, my dad was a scaffolder, and my mum worked in a chip shop. Then my mum taught herself how to be a hairdresser and ended up with her own salon; my dad became a postman and then a counter clerk. Our first house didn't have a bathroom.

People forget I go to work. They forget that the Coleridge house was bought and paid for by the daughter of a travel agent and a barmaid from what the actor Richard Burton once described as the nightmarish 'featureless suburb' of Croydon.

My mum's from Yorkshire and my parents aren't snotty or posh - they're very hard workers, both of them.

A certain kind of person in America loves to note that they're currently soldiering through the latest Pulitzer winner for history, in particular. It connotes a certain gravitas, a connectedness to the literary and intellectual scene that most upwardly mobile professionals in America still desire.