I'll tell you what I'm grateful for, and that's the clarity of understanding that the most important things in life are health, family and friends, and the time to spend on them.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
I was the class clown at school, but at home, my family wasn't very funny.
I was always the class clown; I made my family laugh, and that was when I was always happiest. I grew up listening to stand-up comedians' albums and watching them on TV, on 'The Tonight Show' and Letterman.
I was raised by both parents up to 17. We had a good family. We had a middle class family, good teaching and good surroundings, raised by the church, where I went every week whether I wanted to or not.
I would say I came from upper middle class family.
In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.
I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point.
Probably because I'm from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don't get too excited with big things.
If you are from an ordinary working class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.
I still belong to a middle class family; middle class is a mindset than your financial status.
I was born and brought up in Gurgaon to a middle class family. My father, now retired, worked with the revenue department, and my mother is a housewife. I have two siblings who are both married and have kids. But I was always interested in doing something apart from studies.
I come from a middle class family, and my parents weren't too supportive of my career choices.
I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also.
I cannot take away the fact I am a small-town boy from India, from a lower-middle class family, and was actually standing in front of De Niro - not on an equal level, but as an actor, on the same pedestal.
I was raised in a working class family of Baptist faith, and I went to college on a church scholarship where early teachings were reinforced. Abortion was wrong, I was taught.
I am a normal girl from a humble, middle class family.
Look, everything that you experience as a kid is the foundation of how you are today. I was brought up in a working class family in Leeds and when it comes to money both my parents worked hard and instilled the same attitude into me.
My background is that I came from a middle class family, and I think those values stay where ever you go.
My parents have always been supportive. I come from a very simple middle class family, where the upbringing is very traditional. So for them to give me the kind of freedom to exercise my choices is very fortunate for me.
