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

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

" Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale. "

" 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. "

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

" I never really fit in anywhere. "

" My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

" You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave. "

" I think that's why you see so many Americans in Dublin look so sad: they are looking for the door through which they can begin to understand this place. I tell them, 'Go to the races.' I think it's the best place to start understanding the Irish. "

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

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

" 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. "

" My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn. "

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

" And, of course, they've always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural. "

" 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?' "

" The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "