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

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

" I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that. "

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

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

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

" I hated school in Ireland. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. "

Happy Childhood

" 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. "

" The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free. "

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

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

" 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. "

" If somebody wants me to speak in, say, Chicago, a limousine picks me up at the door to brings me to the airport. I fly at the front of the plane, and a limousine meets me at the other end to take me to a grand hotel, and usually an envelope is left for me with a per diem, maybe $150-a-day walking around money, and then I go home. "

" I learned the significance of my own insignificant life. "

" Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember. "

" 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. "

" Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know? "

" 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. "

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

" I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker. "

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

" I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me. "

" People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book! "

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