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" People want real-life stories. "

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

" Scatter my ashes on the Shannon. "

" In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I first went up to see my editor, I was with my agent, and my editor said, 'Well, what have you been doing all these years?' And my agent said, 'He's been in recovery. From his childhood.' "

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

" I don't know anything about a stock! "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I'm more interested in writing than in performing. "

" The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. "

Happy Childhood

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "