Top 170 Quotes & Sayings by Frank McCourt

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish author Frank McCourt.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Francis McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.

Irish - Author | August 19, 1930 - July 19, 2009

Source: Wikipedia

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

I can do no more than tell the truth.

Frank McCourt

The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.'

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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?

Frank McCourt

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.

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.

Frank McCourt

On the last day of my teaching career, I was sitting in my apartment, having a glass of wine, thinking I'm glad I did it, that I had been somehow useful, that I had learned something.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

Frank McCourt

Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

Frank McCourt

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?

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

One day a week should be set aside for field trips.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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.'

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.

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.

Frank McCourt

Top 170 Quotes & Sayings by Frank McCourt

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