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" 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. "

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

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

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" If I had millions and millions and millions of dollars, I'd leave a large portion to the 42nd Street library. That's why - that was my hangout, the reading rooms, the North and South reading rooms. I'd go there, and my God, I couldn't believe I had access to all of these books. That was my university. "

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

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

" Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list. "

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

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

" My sister died in Brooklyn. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Scatter my ashes on the Shannon. "

" 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. "

" O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters. "

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

" 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.' "

" There's nothing in the world like getting up in front of a high-school classroom in New York City. They won't give you a break if you don't hold them. There's no escape. "

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

" On the last day of my teaching career, I was sitting in my apartment, having a glass of wine, thinking I'm glad I did it, that I had been somehow useful, that I had learned something. "

" When I was a kid, I was a pretty good runner, and there was nothing like winning a race. "

" 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. "

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

" People want real-life stories. "

" 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. "

" 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. "