“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...”
0 likes
Author detail
Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996) for his memoir *Angela's Ashes* (1996), which details his childhood as a poor Irish Catholic in Limerick. He is also the author of *'Tis* (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of the previous book and focusing on life as a new immigrant in America. *Teacher Man* (2005) detailed the challenges of being a young, uncertain teacher who must impart knowledge to his students. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.
Quotes
Showing 61-80 of 87
“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...”
0 likes
“They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.”
0 likes
“I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”
0 likes
“People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!”
0 likes
“Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“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 m...”
0 likes
“We were supposed to stay over in Boston, but when Scribners heard I'd won the Pulitzer, they told me to get on a plane - that Katie Couric wanted my body. And when Katie Couric wants your bo...”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.”
0 likes
“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...”
0 likes
“They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.”
0 likes
“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...”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.”
0 likes
“I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.”
0 likes
“When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.”
0 likes
“And, of course, they've always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.”
0 likes
“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?”
0 likes