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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.

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

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?'

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I can do no more than tell the truth.

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

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.

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

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

I don't know anything about a stock!

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.

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

I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.

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

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

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

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 never really fit in anywhere.

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

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