Steven Berkoff Quotes

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

I make films about working class people.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

God has always been hard on the poor.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

I am a coolie and the son of a coolie. I was born with the poor, and I am still poor. My sympathies have always been with the struggling mass.

I come from a working class family. We barely had anything.

I am a social realist writer.

I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

Boxing is for the poor man. A lot of people don't know what's going on, but I've been able to see it first-hand, and if I can speak out on the behalf of fighters going through problems, I will, because... it's important to create awareness. Everyone should speak up. Because if people are aware, maybe there can be change.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

I come from a lower-middle-class family and used to stay in a housing board colony.

In the late '90s, I spent a lot of time on reservations, and there was a level of poverty and injustice that I had not witnessed before. I was shocked by it. This is federally controlled land, and there was an insidious mix of apathy and exploitation.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.

Having grown up a trailer park kid on welfare and food stamps, becoming jaded is impossible, although now I make a good living, which I'm not ashamed of; when you've been poor, it never leaves you.

It's a mistake to think that there's a difference between someone on the street and someone not on the street.