Frank McCourt
Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.Collection: Christmas
The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.Collection: Experience
Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Diet
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.Collection: Teacher
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.Collection: Christmas
The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.Collection: Teacher
Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.
I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.
The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
You sail into the harbor, and Staten Island is on your left, and then you see the Statue of Liberty. This is what everyone in the world has dreams of when they think about New York. And I thought, 'My God, I'm in Heaven. I'll be dancing down Fifth Avenue like Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers.'
St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate.
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.
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.
Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.
Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.
Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.
My sister died in Brooklyn.
I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.
We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.
My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.
There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
Even when I went to the Lion's Head in the Village, where all you journalists would hang out, I was always peripheral. I was never really part of anything except the classroom. That's where I belonged.
I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.
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.
My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
And, of course, they've always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.
I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food.
I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable.
They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.
I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.
I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
If somebody wants me to speak in, say, Chicago, a limousine picks me up at the door to brings me to the airport. I fly at the front of the plane, and a limousine meets me at the other end to take me to a grand hotel, and usually an envelope is left for me with a per diem, maybe $150-a-day walking around money, and then I go home.
If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.
We were supposed to stay over in Boston, but when Scribners heard I'd won the Pulitzer, they told me to get on a plane - that Katie Couric wanted my body. And when Katie Couric wants your body, you get moving right away.
They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.
It's like a series of waves hitting you. First, getting excerpted in the 'New Yorker' last summer, then getting published, then the best-seller list, the award, the movie deal, now this, a Pulitzer.
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.'
When I was a kid, I was a pretty good runner, and there was nothing like winning a race.
When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.
I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.
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.
Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?
I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
You look at passers-by in Rome and think, 'Do they know what they have here?' You can say the same about Philadelphia. Do people know what went on here?