Americans deserve to feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them and say, 'We're going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China Sea.'
I stopped going to school in the middle of fourth grade. Everyone grows up with the peer pressure, and kids being mean to each other in school. I think that's such a horrible thing, but I never really dealt with it in a high school way.
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
What I'm really addicted to is getting people to understand that if their kids aren't competent readers coming out of middle school, it's really going to be hard for them in high school.
In middle school, I played quarterback. I was at a tiny school, so you played offense and defense - I played linebacker, and in high school I stopped playing around my sophomore year because of my acting stuff.
We shot 'Delusion' in the middle of the desert and outside of Las Vegas where they did those underground nuclear bomb testings. So I only ate oysters and drank coffee because I didn't want to turn into a mutant.
The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.
When I recently spent a night at a homeless shelter, I was dismayed that members of the middle class had moved in and that earning above the minimum wage did not protect adults from having to share a room with dozens of others.
Oh, it's essential. I mean, you have to - if I'm writing about the Middle East, I have to go there, and if possible, stay long enough to get a real feeling for what's going on.
A candidate who tries to steer a path down the middle in an effort to 'win independents' runs the risk of convincing everyone that they have no core values. As much as - or more than - any other voters, independents want to see conviction and authent...
We can get more energy out of the north slope of Alaska; we have available the ability to make ourselves less dependent on those uncertain sources of supply from the Middle East. And it's important we do that.
I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
It's much easier for a middle class Indian entrepreneur to start up a computer company than it is for an Indian company to build roads and transportation systems suitable for a population that is getting wealthier and demanding more basic services.
I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.
I look a little bit like Barbie and talk a little bit like Ken. It's easier for me to sit in the middle of the boys' club than to be surrounded by people concerned about getting their hair and nails done.
I do feel a wave come over me when I hear those two words, 'Star' and 'Wars,' said together. I feel tense, shut up, and stare into the middle distance.
We were talking about how old quarterbacks can't throw before 10 am... Practice starts too early for us. Wake me up in the middle of the night and I can throw. I can throw anytime.
For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.
I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It's not what we do here in America. I don't think there's anything called 'middle class values' that are different from the values of other people in this country.
Teenagers especially are very, very conscious about what is hip and what is lame and what is square and what is out and what is in, you know. And, I mean, I grew up right there in the middle of a black culture. And I knew dead-on what it was.
