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" I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food. "

Frank McCourt

America

Good

Food

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose. "

Frank McCourt

You

Great

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

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

Frank McCourt

Should

North

" 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. "

" My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born. "

" 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. "

" One day a week should be set aside for field trips. "

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

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

" 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?' "

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

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

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

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

" 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? "

" They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I. "

Frank McCourt

Business

Mistake

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

" People want real-life stories. "

" 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. "

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

" When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. "

" I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York. "

" At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids. "

" The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory. "

" 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. "