In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascina...
You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance, don't think you stand a fucking chance.
I still am in touch with several friends from high school. I don't go to reunions much. I'm afraid that if I go back to the school, they'll suddenly go, 'You know what? We've checked the records and you still have one more French class. Get back in h...
I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to tak...
To realize President Obama's vision of opportunity for all, it's all about making the right match. The way we do that is through job-driven training - connecting ready-to-work Americans with ready to be-filled jobs. It helps more people secure a foot...
Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because thos...
We've got very large freshman class, it's historic in its size, so there's people that are extremely diverse in their backgrounds and their viewpoints. I think that we're going to see a conservative group of people coming together, focused on some re...
I won't allow magazines in the house. When I was younger, I wanted to have my hair cut like so-and-so in the class above me at school, not somebody in a magazine. You see young girls trying to dress like so-and-so because they've seen lots of picture...
The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their hou...
In those days, reserve duty lasted for six years, which, I might add, was three times as long as service in the regular army, although to be perfectly honest, I was unable to fulfill my entire obligation because I was taking acting classes and they s...
'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining some...
Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift,...
And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?
The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arab...
When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instr...
He said that doubt provided contour to faith, like shading in a drawing, that it allowed you to see what was really there. At the time we were learning how to sketch in art class, I felt like it was the one thing he said that I actually understood.
Following graduation from high school in 1948, I attended Harvard University where I became a physics major. Having grown up in a small town, I found Harvard to be an enormously enriching experience. Students in my class came from all walks of life a...
I do a one-hour workout called Drenched, a cardio-boxing fitness routine, Monday through Friday. There are usually between twenty-five and fifty people there - everyone from stay-at-home moms and professional martial artists to teenagers and seniors....
Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that'...
I meet people from really grand backgrounds who had horrible parents who took no interest in them, whereas I'm a working-class boy from Deptford who was worshipped by all my rellies. Everybody in my extended family helped to raise me, and I realise n...
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...
