Working Class Upbringing Quotes

My father was very clear; I had to have an ordinary upbringing. I was put to work as a lowly-paid trainee after college. I didn't like it at the time, but I can't help but feel that that was probably the best thing for me.

My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.

I think a lot of people think I was born in a blue suit, on the David Brinkley show. And that isn't me. I am much more that kid who grew up in South St. Louis, in a very modest household, with a simple background with parents who didn't get through high school.

I think the ultimate challenge is to have some kind of style and grace, even though you haven't got money, or standing in society, or formal education. I had a very middle, lower-middle class sort of upbringing, but I identify with people who've had, at some point in their lives to struggle to survive. It adds another color to your character.

My parents, like others of "The Greatest Generation" who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, wanted to provide the best possible life for their children. My mother and father both attended college but dropped out to earn a living during the Depression, working the rest of their lives at blue-collar work.

I grew up on a council estate when I was younger.

Mine was quite a working-class childhood with very little money, and my father was out of work a couple of times, which had quite a traumatic effect.

I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.

My parents both came from very poor working-class families.

I meet people from really grand backgrounds who had horrible parents who took no interest in them, whereas I'm a working-class boy from Deptford who was worshipped by all my rellies. Everybody in my extended family helped to raise me, and I realise now how lucky I was to grow up among kind folk.

I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It's the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America.

I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.

I had great memories of growing up in a working class estate. I remember it being sunny all the time. So we're putting that on screen. It's not people wallowing in degradation.

My background is not typical of a lawyer or a DPP. My dad was a toolmaker before he retired, so he worked in a factory all his life.

I did a lot of jobs when I was a kid - paper boy, grocery boy, all those things. I guess maybe I got a point of view then.

I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood and was raised by a man who did not emote, ever... I always cry at movies, and when I was a kid, I would try to hide it. It wasn't something a kid in Oaklyn, N.J., did. So I have these weird hang-ups about emotions.

Aline and I have travelled a very long, very hard road together, from our working class homes in rural Quebec to the palaces of London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Politics was the route, public service the reward.