Frank McCourt Quotes
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I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.
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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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At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
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In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.
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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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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 think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
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My sister died in Brooklyn.
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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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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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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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I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
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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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The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
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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 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 can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.
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There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
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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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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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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 ate the sandwich.