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.

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

Frank McCourt Quotes