Jim Crace Quotes

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

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

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

The common people are more disposed to trust one of their own class [in political office] than those who may efect to be superior.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

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?

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

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

I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know.

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

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.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.

You'd be surprised how many politicians have a working class background but they get it beaten out of them.

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.

Asa Briggs was a historian of class history, so he felt obligated to bring in his driver. That's the English class thing that is much weaker now.

Since I still think of myself as a middle class guy, people get to see that side of me in films like 'Middle Class Abbayi.'

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.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

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

I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don't like connecting with them.

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.