Frank McCourt Quotes
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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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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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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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I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
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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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I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
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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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I hated school in Ireland.
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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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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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My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
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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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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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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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The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
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A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.
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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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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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My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.
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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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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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For some reason, I had a responsibility to my family and the people who lived around me. I felt that I had to convey their dignity - the way they dealt with adversity and poverty - and their good humor.
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Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.
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Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.