Frank McCourt Quotes
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I think that's why you see so many Americans in Dublin look so sad: they are looking for the door through which they can begin to understand this place. I tell them, 'Go to the races.' I think it's the best place to start understanding the Irish.
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I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
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I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.
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Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.
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A lot of people say writers start losing their powers after 60 or 65. But I look at the best-seller list and see a book by that 14-year-old gymnast, Dominique Moceanu, and I think, 'Now, what's she going to tell the world? And these 25-year-old rock stars, what are they going to tell the world?'
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The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.
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I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.
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People want real-life stories.
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They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.
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I know it wasn't the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn't I be like that to her?
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I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable.
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On the last day of my teaching career, I was sitting in my apartment, having a glass of wine, thinking I'm glad I did it, that I had been somehow useful, that I had learned something.
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Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.
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I couldn't even pick up the newspaper without saying, 'This is a fine piece of writing. I wish to hell I could write like this.'
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When I was a kid, I was a pretty good runner, and there was nothing like winning a race.
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Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to.
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Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.
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I would dream of going up to the 'New York Times' and asking them if I could please be a copy boy or let me scrub the toilets or something like that. But I couldn't rise to those heights.
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I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food.
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If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.
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I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.
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You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.
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I had never attended high school, but I was fairly well read.
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That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.