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" At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids. "
Frank McCourt
Get
You
Supposed
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" 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. "
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24 Hours
About
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Place
Spring
Bed
" I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so. "
Frank McCourt
Years
Been
Notebooks
" My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all. "
Frank McCourt
Number
Dream
Congress
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Nothing
New York
Baseball
" You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave. "
Frank McCourt
Urgency
You
Staring
" That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor. "
Frank McCourt
Going
Absurdity
Us
" I can do no more than tell the truth. "
Frank McCourt
Truth
Than
Tell
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Work
Dressed
Apple
" Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings. "
Frank McCourt
Steel
Details
Just
" 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
Own
Life
Journalism
" 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.' "
Frank McCourt
Sail
New York
God
" I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this. "
Frank McCourt
You
Write
Nobody
" 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?' "
Frank McCourt
Think
Stars
Losing
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Self
Debt
Portrait
" I'm a late bloomer. "
Frank McCourt
Bloomer
Late Bloomer
Late
" 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? "
Frank McCourt
Think
You
Know
" We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely. "
Frank McCourt
Memory
Christmas
Had
" I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker. "
Frank McCourt
American
Irish
Myself
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Moments
Father
Warrior
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Teacher
Time
Walk
" Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow. "
Frank McCourt
Hard
Happiness
Recall
" 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.' "
Frank McCourt
Doing
You
Said
" I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die. "
Frank McCourt
Humor
Think
Die
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Prize
Still
Won
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Brooklyn
Mother
Think
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Superior
Hierarchy
Above
" People want real-life stories. "
Frank McCourt
Stories
People
Real-Life
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Think
Home
Me
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
High School
New York
School