The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
Frank McCourt
Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.
Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.
The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
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.
When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.
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.
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 certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
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.
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.
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.
I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.
Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.
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.
At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!
They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.
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.
We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.
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 don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
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 was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
I don't know anything about a stock!
There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
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?'
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?
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.
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.
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.
My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
People want real-life stories.
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.
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.
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.
If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.
Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.
I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
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'm a late bloomer.
The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.
St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate.
