In high school, I was too shy to perform. It's one thing to get laughs from your family, to be funny at parties and in class. It's another thing to get up on the stage.
You can't hide behind race any more. You can't hide behind class structure any more. You can't hide behind family. You need to produce.
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
The system of creating opportunities for those who were by law excluded, you've got to do that. But you mustn't create a perception that the process is devoid of competitiveness... devoid of building a world class, sustainable black business communit...
In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.
Despite the situation in Cuba, I had a chance to play on the national team; and compared to other baseball players and other people in Cuba, I had the opportunity to live at a level that was not very high class but in the middle.
I was a kid watching music videos, which were so cool and made me want to learn how to dance. I wish I could've gone to dance classes and learn, like, hip-hop dancing.
I would like to be a heart surgeon or brain surgeon... something with that knowledge and the ability to save a life would be pretty cool. I wasn't that good in science class, though.
Acknowledging class was always difficult for 'New Democrats' - it was second-wave, it was divisive - but 2008 made retro politics cool again.
My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.
The trial by jury is a trial by 'the country,' in contradistinction to a trial by the government. The jurors are drawn by lot from the mass of the people, for the very purpose of having all classes of minds and feelings, that prevail among the people...
I don't want to remember 2005 as a year that the government heaped unnecessary burdens upon American families. Stealing from the poor and middle class and giving to the rich, while increasing the deficit, is hardly responsible.
Opponents of health care reform would take away consumer protections - siding with the insurance industry instead of the middle class. We can't afford that.
When I finally decided that my only hope was to go to college, I took an acting class, and once I walked onstage, I just knew I was home.
When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'
I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.
On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class.
History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.
We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don't give...
I originally wanted to be a pop star. I wanted to be Kylie Minogue. My dad thought that was a very silly ambition and introduced me to drama classes. Once I became fixated on that, there was no stopping me.
