Frank McCourt Quotes
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I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
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We don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor if you're a high school teacher, and they pay teachers - they pay teachers in Europe.
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I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.
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You look at passers-by in Rome and think, 'Do they know what they have here?' You can say the same about Philadelphia. Do people know what went on here?
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It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.
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At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
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I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
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In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.
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If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.
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My sister died in Brooklyn.
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I don't know anything about a stock!
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We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.
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Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.
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O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.
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There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
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Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
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When I first went up to see my editor, I was with my agent, and my editor said, 'Well, what have you been doing all these years?' And my agent said, 'He's been in recovery. From his childhood.'
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The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
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I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
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I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.
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I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.
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When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.
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If somebody wants me to speak in, say, Chicago, a limousine picks me up at the door to brings me to the airport. I fly at the front of the plane, and a limousine meets me at the other end to take me to a grand hotel, and usually an envelope is left for me with a per diem, maybe $150-a-day walking around money, and then I go home.
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I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.