Frank McCourt

In public schools, classes are bloated - it's ridiculous.

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

I'm a late bloomer.

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

I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.

I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I can do no more than tell the truth.

People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!

We had nothing, no television, no radio, nothing to get in the way. We read by the streetlight at the top of the lane, and we acted out the stories.

The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.

I was just dreaming, and if, if I'd written the book and nobody wanted it, I would have put it in the drawer and said, 'Well, I did that.'

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

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.

I don't know anything about a stock!

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

My sister died in Brooklyn.

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

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.

I never really fit in anywhere.

I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.

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.

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 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.

People come up to me and talk about the alcoholism in their family.

We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.

Teachers have a million stories, but nobody consults them.

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.

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

You're beginning to hear the tale of the common man and woman rather than the traditional memoir about the generals who just finished the war or the politicians who just rendered glorious service to the country.

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.

People want real-life stories.

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 wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.

Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale.

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.

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

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.

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.

I couldn't even pick up the newspaper without saying, 'This is a fine piece of writing. I wish to hell I could write like this.'

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

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

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 ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.