Frank McCourt Quotes
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I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
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If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery.
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I wanted to be the Great Liberating Teacher, to raise them from their knees after days of drudgery in office and factories, to help them cast off their shackles, to lead them to the mountaintop, to breathe the air of freedom. Once their minds were clear of cant, they’d see me as a savior.
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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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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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I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
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I hated school in Ireland.
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Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
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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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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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A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.
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I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
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My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.
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When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
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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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We had nothing, no television, no radio, nothing to get in the way. We read by the streetlight at the top of the lane, and we acted out the stories.
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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.
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We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.
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If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.
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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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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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The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
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You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.
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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.