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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.
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.
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 had never attended high school, but I was fairly well read.
My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.
Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.
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.
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 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.
The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin.
I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
People want real-life stories.
I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.
The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free.
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 hated school in Ireland.
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 I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.
I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.
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.
In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.
People come up to me and talk about the alcoholism in their family.
Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.
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.
My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
I don't know anything about a stock!
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.'
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 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.
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.
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.
Teachers have a million stories, but nobody consults them.
I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.
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.
I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York.
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.
We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.
We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.
Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.
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 never really fit in anywhere.
My sister died in Brooklyn.
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.
