Frank McCourt Quotes
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At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
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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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We were supposed to stay over in Boston, but when Scribners heard I'd won the Pulitzer, they told me to get on a plane - that Katie Couric wanted my body. And when Katie Couric wants your body, you get moving right away.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
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I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.
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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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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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Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
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I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
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I ate the sandwich.
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No, young man. No jokes here. There's a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You're the teacher. You say you went out with a sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish.
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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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Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.