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When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
Frank McCourt -
Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they're Irish and we should all have a drink? It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen.
Frank McCourt
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I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.
Frank McCourt -
You're beginning to hear the tale of the common man and woman rather than the traditional memoir about the generals who just finished the war or the politicians who just rendered glorious service to the country.
Frank McCourt -
If I went to the pub lunch and cleared my head with a pint surely there would be an insight, a flash of inspiration. Surely. My money went over the bar. The pint came back. Nothing else.
Frank McCourt -
My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
Frank McCourt -
I never really fit in anywhere.
Frank McCourt -
I ate the sandwich.
Frank McCourt
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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.
Frank McCourt -
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.'
Frank McCourt -
People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!
Frank McCourt -
I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
Frank McCourt -
The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free.
Frank McCourt -
First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.
Frank McCourt
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I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.
Frank McCourt -
He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.
Frank McCourt -
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.
Frank McCourt -
Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.
Frank McCourt -
If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery.
Frank McCourt -
Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
Frank McCourt
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I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.
Frank McCourt -
I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
Frank McCourt -
Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
Frank McCourt -
There were a number of houses. When we first arrived in Limerick, it was a one-room affair with most of it taken up with a bed.
Frank McCourt