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" The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory. "

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

" St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" You look at passers-by in Rome and think, 'Do they know what they have here?' You can say the same about Philadelphia. Do people know what went on here? "

" Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap. "

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

" The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin. "

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