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" 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires. "

" I'm a late bloomer. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I knew I had to find my own way of teaching. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost. "

" 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. "

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

" For some reason, I had a responsibility to my family and the people who lived around me. I felt that I had to convey their dignity - the way they dealt with adversity and poverty - and their good humor. "

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

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

" 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. "

" People come up to me and talk about the alcoholism in their family. "

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

" We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters. "