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" People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book! "
Frank McCourt
Family
Think
Book
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" People come up to me and talk about the alcoholism in their family. "
Frank McCourt
People
Family
Come
" I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book. "
Frank McCourt
Writing
Nothing
Matter
" I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so. "
Frank McCourt
Years
Been
Notebooks
" I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning. "
Frank McCourt
New
New York
School
" 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? "
Frank McCourt
Meaning
You
Ideas
" When I was a kid, I was a pretty good runner, and there was nothing like winning a race. "
Frank McCourt
Good
Nothing
Like
" I'm more interested in writing than in performing. "
Frank McCourt
Interested
More
Performing
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Place
Spring
Bed
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Church
Admire
Help
" 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
More
Mistake
" We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires. "
Frank McCourt
Shoes
Bicycle
Father
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Work
Dressed
Apple
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Street
Way
Back
" You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave. "
Frank McCourt
Urgency
You
Staring
" At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids. "
Frank McCourt
Get
You
Supposed
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Brooklyn
Mother
Think
" It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me. "
Frank McCourt
Book
Listening
Seeing
" I'm a late bloomer. "
Frank McCourt
Bloomer
Late Bloomer
Late
" Even when I went to the Lion's Head in the Village, where all you journalists would hang out, I was always peripheral. I was never really part of anything except the classroom. That's where I belonged. "
Frank McCourt
Village
You
Lion
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Moments
Father
Warrior
" We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely. "
Frank McCourt
Memory
Christmas
Had
" There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd. "
Frank McCourt
Absurdity
Absurd
Poverty
" The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin. "
Frank McCourt
Houses
Know
Lived
" When I read about Joyce, I realised that there was no eight-till-one in his life: it was 24 hours a day for him. "
Frank McCourt
Life
24 Hours
About
" I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die. "
Frank McCourt
Humor
Think
Die
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Book
Me
Say
" The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free. "
Frank McCourt
Will
Write
Day
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Heights
New York
Me
" Scatter my ashes on the Shannon. "
Frank McCourt
Scatter
Ashes
" I can do no more than tell the truth. "
Frank McCourt
Truth
Than
Tell