Rita Mae Brown Quotes

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

Because I came from the working class, I still identify with them. I don't identify with the middle class.

I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that's what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that's what I am.

I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

I don't think you can get any more working class than me. Everyone seems posh to me.

I still consider myself working class. I know my circumstances have changed dramatically since I was growing up back in Birkenhead.

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.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

I'm a working-class person, working with class.

We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

I come from a very working-class background.

I come from a working-class background in Queens, New York.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

Class is something I know about. I've lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

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.