Frank McCourt

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.

Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.

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?

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.

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

You have to give yourself credit, not too much because that would be bragging.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

I can do no more than tell the truth.

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 can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.

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.'

I had never attended high school, but I was fairly well read.

When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

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.'

I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.

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.

I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.

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.

Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.

Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to.

My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.

People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!

Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale.

The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin.

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.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this.

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.

I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.

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.

We don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor if you're a high school teacher, and they pay teachers - they pay teachers in Europe.

Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.

Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.

St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate.

Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.

Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.

Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

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.

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.

O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.

I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.

It's lovely to know that the world can't interfere with the inside of your head.

If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.

I was just dreaming, and if, if I'd written the book and nobody wanted it, I would have put it in the drawer and said, 'Well, I did that.'

My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.

There's nothing in the world like getting up in front of a high-school classroom in New York City. They won't give you a break if you don't hold them. There's no escape.

The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.

I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.

My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.

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.

I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York.

I never really fit in anywhere.

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.

A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.

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.

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.

When I was a kid, I was a pretty good runner, and there was nothing like winning a race.

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.

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.

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.

I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.

The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.

The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.

I would dream of going up to the 'New York Times' and asking them if I could please be a copy boy or let me scrub the toilets or something like that. But I couldn't rise to those heights.

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.

That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.

In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.

I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.

People come up to me and talk about the alcoholism in their family.

I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.

I don't know anything about a stock!

Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.

I was a houseman, the lowest. I was just above - in the hierarchy of jobs, I was just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers - just above, so I felt superior to them.

At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.

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.

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.

You have to give yourself credit not too much because that would be bragging.

We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.

I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.

You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.

My sister died in Brooklyn.

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.

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.

When I was a teacher, I'd walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed operations. I was an intellectual and artistic and moral traffic cop, and I - and I would direct the class, most of the time.

After a full belly all is poetry.

They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.

It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.

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.

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.

My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.

I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

A lot of people say writers start losing their powers after 60 or 65. But I look at the best-seller list and see a book by that 14-year-old gymnast, Dominique Moceanu, and I think, 'Now, what's she going to tell the world? And these 25-year-old rock stars, what are they going to tell the world?'

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.

When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.

I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.