Frank McCourt Quotes
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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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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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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.
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If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery.
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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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But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me.
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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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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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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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I hated school in Ireland.
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Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
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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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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 was unloading sides of beef down on the docks when I decided enough was enough. By then, I'd done a lot of reading on my own, so I persuaded New York University to enroll me.
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The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
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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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If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.