Top 77 Frank McCourt Quotes

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

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.

That’s what kept us going – a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.

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’m more interested in writing than in performing.

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

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.

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 know anything about a stock!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

I’m a late bloomer.

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.’

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I hated school in Ireland.

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.

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.

Teachers have a million stories, but nobody consults them.

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.

The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.

My sister died in Brooklyn.

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

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

I can do no more than tell the truth.

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.

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

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.