Frank McCourt

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.”

“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.”

“Mam was always saying we had a simple diet: tea and bread, bread and tea, a liquid and a solid, a balanced diet - what more do you need? Nobody got fat.”

“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?'”

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

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

“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.'”

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

“We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.”

“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.”

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

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

“Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.”

“They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.”

“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.'”

“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.'”