Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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.' "

Related Quotes:

" 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 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. "

" Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train. "

Frank McCourt

Think

Home

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

" I never really fit in anywhere. "

" My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born. "

" You sail into the harbor, and Staten Island is on your left, and then you see the Statue of Liberty. This is what everyone in the world has dreams of when they think about New York. And I thought, 'My God, I'm in Heaven. I'll be dancing down Fifth Avenue like Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers.' "

" For some reason, I had a responsibility to my family and the people who lived around me. I felt that I had to convey their dignity - the way they dealt with adversity and poverty - and their good humor. "

" Scatter my ashes on the Shannon. "

Frank McCourt

Scatter

Ashes

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

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

" 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. "

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

" At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids. "

" 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. "

Frank McCourt

You

Great

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

" Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a late bloomer. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I hated school in Ireland. "

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