Frank McCourt Quotes
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I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York.
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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.
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There was a kind of madness in the country. Eamon De Valera, the prime minister, had this vision of an Ireland where we'd all be in some kind of native costume - which doesn't exist - and we'd be dancing at the crossroads, babbling away in Gaelic, going to Mass, everyone virginal and pure.
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I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
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I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
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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.
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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.
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I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.
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Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for.
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My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.
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I hated school in Ireland.
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When I read about Joyce, I realised that there was no eight-till-one in his life: it was 24 hours a day for him.
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If I had millions and millions and millions of dollars, I'd leave a large portion to the 42nd Street library. That's why - that was my hangout, the reading rooms, the North and South reading rooms. I'd go there, and my God, I couldn't believe I had access to all of these books. That was my university.
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My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
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For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
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Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.
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The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
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My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
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A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.
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I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.
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Mam was always saying we had a simple diet: tea and bread, bread and tea, a liquid and a solid, a balanced diet - what more do you need? Nobody got fat.
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I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
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They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them. … They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don’t care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them.
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Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.