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" I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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 hated school in Ireland. "

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

" 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. "

" I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind. "

" If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher. "

" We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely. "

" I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't. "

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

" Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings. "

" The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice. "

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

" The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Scatter my ashes on the Shannon. "

" 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. "

" There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd. "