Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I learned the significance of my own insignificant life. "

" I can do no more than tell the truth. "

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

" Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People want real-life stories. "

" 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 think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die. "

" That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor. "

" I don't know anything about a stock! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'm a late bloomer. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it. "

" 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. "