Tom Jones Quotes

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.

Rick Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner. His dad was the manager of a V.A. hospital.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

My father was incredible: a longshoreman; my mother was a secretary. Very 'go to work' people. That's how I saw things.

I make films about working class people.

I come from a very working-class background.

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

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

I come from a very working-class background.

I am the son of a mine worker.

There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

I'm lucky to have football. My father was 16 when he worked in the mines. That's practically a child, going down the mines.

I came from a working-class family. My dad was in a union. I never forgot what it was like to be a private.

I think Ant and I were ambitious because of where we come from. Both of us are from working-class families on council estates in Newcastle.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

I grew up in a household that was a labor household. My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver. My mother was a secretary. Neither of them got through high school. But they worked hard and they gave me very, very important opportunities to go to school, get a good education.

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.

I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old.

My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

When I got outta High School I was driving a truck. I was just a poor boy from Memphis, Memphis.

I think my father kept struggling to get us into better neighborhoods, better schools. One of the worst jobs he had was folding shirts under these fluorescent lights all day at the equivalent of a Kmart. I remember visiting him at work, thinking, 'When I grow up, I've got to do anything else.'

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.