Frank McCourt Quotes
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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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In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.
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At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
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I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.
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My sister died in Brooklyn.
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I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
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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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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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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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Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.
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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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I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
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The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
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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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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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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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I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.
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I don't know anything about a stock!
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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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There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
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He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
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I was a houseman, the lowest. I was just above - in the hierarchy of jobs, I was just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers - just above, so I felt superior to them.
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I ate the sandwich.