I was terribly shy and never said anything in class. Then I started getting into school plays. When you've got words to say, you've got a sort of armour.
I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding.
I still consider myself working class. I know my circumstances have changed dramatically since I was growing up back in Birkenhead.
I think the state has some serious problems. Just look at the layoffs going on across the state, not just in Chicago. It affects the middle class. It pushes people down.
I used to have a phrase: Liberalism is spreading misery equally. And now the ruling class throughout Washington seems to have adopted this.
My mother sent me to dance and drama classes when I was young, and then I got a stage role in 'Set To Partners' when I was 12, followed by Benjamin Britten's 'Let's Make An Opera.'
I started dancing when I was four years old and then was in class until I was about 20 years old or so, and then primarily was dancing just in shows that I was doing, but not really studying and training.
I would like to learn so many things: I'd like to take tennis classes, I'd like continuing vocal lessons, and I'd definitely like taking more ice skating and more tap.
I took a drama class in elementary school, and I just remember having so much fun with it. From there, I just studied, got better as I went along, and continued to grow.
I did take some voiceover classes. I always loved the idea of doing a voice for a cartoon character. I just voiced the character of Suzi X in the upcoming 'The Haunted World of El Superbeasto.'
I started playing violin when I was six, so I thought I could be a professional. It wasn't until I was 15 when I got into acting classes and realized this was what I wanted to do.
I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
At Temple University, and I'm sure this was the way in a lot of film classes, comedy was not an option, and not considered a serious form of expression. You had to make a film about an issue.
You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.
The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.
There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.
Remember, the early '60s in London was something - which must have been like Berlin in the '30s when the arts flourished. You didn't have the differences in class, and so on.
Without Socialism the working class is a heterogeneous mixture of different categories, some of which have independent, varying interests, sometimes opposed to each other.
I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.
At Leeds the idea of an international labour organization appeared in a trade-union text which also drew attention to the danger to the working classes inherent in the existence of international capitalist competition.
In school, I didn't speak up often in class. I was never the person to yell out an answer. If I knew it, I might whisper it to my buddy and let him answer. I kept quiet.
