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" 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

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

Frank McCourt

Going

Absurdity

" 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. "

" I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church. "

" Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow. "

" 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. "

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

" Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring. "

" 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. "

" I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book. "

" Teachers have a million stories, but nobody consults them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Frank McCourt

Book

Say

" I had never attended high school, but I was fairly well read. "

" 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. "

" Even when I went to the Lion's Head in the Village, where all you journalists would hang out, I was always peripheral. I was never really part of anything except the classroom. That's where I belonged. "

" If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman. "

" Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list. "

Frank McCourt

People

Memoirs

" 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. "

" I'm a late bloomer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Frank McCourt

Heights

New York

" 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. "

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

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

" I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed. "

" I was just dreaming, and if, if I'd written the book and nobody wanted it, I would have put it in the drawer and said, 'Well, I did that.' "

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

" I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so. "

" I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable. "

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