Tracey Ullman Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

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.

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.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

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

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

It is surprising how few references in our politics there are to the underclass as compared by the middle class.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.

The beauty of not growing up middle class is that you don't think like the middle class. You don't have anything to protect, you know what I mean?

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

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?