Top 170 Quotes & Sayings by Frank McCourt - Page 2

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'm a late bloomer.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Teachers have a million stories, but nobody consults them.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

I never really fit in anywhere.

Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.

I think that's why you see so many Americans in Dublin look so sad: they are looking for the door through which they can begin to understand this place. I tell them, 'Go to the races.' I think it's the best place to start understanding the Irish.

People want real-life stories.

I hated school in Ireland.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

My sister died in Brooklyn.

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.

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

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?'

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.

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.

I don't know anything about a stock!

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.

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.

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

I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.

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.

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

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

If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.

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 couldn't even pick up the newspaper without saying, 'This is a fine piece of writing. I wish to hell I could write like this.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free.

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

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

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.

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.

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.