The middle class is so funny it's the class I know best and it's the class where you find the most pretension so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had and it doesn't cost the government a dime.

You don't despair about something like the Middle East you just do the best you can.

Baalbek is so beautiful. It is the heart of beauty in the Middle East - I want to embrace these people with my music. I will try so hard for them. Their president is a Christian their prime minister is a Muslim. Music is for everyone.

I like the idea of accessibility coming from a lower-middle-class background myself I feel like beauty and products should be accessible to all women over the world.

Here you do have forests where pigs could be raised by letting them root about in the forests for a good part of the year. Therefore you have a different attitude toward them compared with what continues to exist in the Middle East.

I am Classic Rock Revisited. I revisit it every waking moment of my life because it has the spirit and the attitude and the fire and the middle finger. I am Rosa Parks with a Gibson guitar.

I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it's certainly worth a try.

Yet for my part deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

I spend up to two hours a day on correspondence. Hearing from fans on the Internet and being able to directly respond to the fan base is exciting. You can cut out the middle man like the fan club... before a recent appearance in Tyler Texas I had fans reaching out on MySpace offering their lake house Mavericks tickets. It was amazing.

My dad was working abroad in Iraq and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him in Baghdad off and on. For the first ten years of my life we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

Directing is a really kind of amazing thing because you're helping others and in the middle of that you have to worry about yourself.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end locked in your head alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture as the little creep through the great break through and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it.

I don't know much about only children. I was the middle one of three and if ever I was alone with mum and dad it was a rare moment.

The biggest opportunity in 2013 is in Africa. It has seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. In Nigeria alone there are 100 million people with mobile phones. In total 300 million Africans - five times the population of Britain - are in the middle class.

Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us and it was very still but there were whispers.

I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.

For students today only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

I never felt totally 100% patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon and Damascus and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

Middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist begin to change places.

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.