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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Frank McCourt Quotes

The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.

– Frank McCourt

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

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

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

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?

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

Ireland, once you live there, you’re seduced by it.

– Frank McCourt

I don’t know anything about a stock!

– Frank McCourt

My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that’s all.

– Frank McCourt

That’s what kept us going – a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn’t work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back… I went to his funeral in Belfast.

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God’s work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable.

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks’ Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.

– Frank McCourt

You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you’re staring into the grave.

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

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.

– Frank McCourt

My sister died in Brooklyn.

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

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

– Frank McCourt

I’m not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice… It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

– Frank McCourt

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