The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.
— Frank McCourt
I can do no more than tell the truth.
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.
A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment.
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.
That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
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.
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.
Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.
The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
One day a week should be set aside for field trips.
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?
When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.
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.'
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.
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.
I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate.
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.
I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this.
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.
My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.
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?
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.
When I was a kid, I was a pretty good runner, and there was nothing like winning a race.
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.
If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.
I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!
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.
Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.
I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
I'm a late bloomer.
I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.
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.
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.'
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.
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.
I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome.
I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.
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.
They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.
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.
