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

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

" 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. "

" People want real-life stories. "

" I think there are two cities in the world - New York and Rome. "

" We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

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

" Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely. "

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

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

" You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose. "

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

" 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 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It's like a series of waves hitting you. First, getting excerpted in the 'New Yorker' last summer, then getting published, then the best-seller list, the award, the movie deal, now this, a Pulitzer. "

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

" My sister died in Brooklyn. "

" Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life. "

" A funeral was a great form of entertainment. A wake was a great form of entertainment. "

" When I was a teacher, I'd walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed operations. I was an intellectual and artistic and moral traffic cop, and I - and I would direct the class, most of the time. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "