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" 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.' "
Frank McCourt
Just
Dreaming
Book
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" That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor. "
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Absurdity
Us
" Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it. "
Frank McCourt
Ireland
Once
Seduced
" 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
Kind
Country
Vision
" We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires. "
Frank McCourt
Shoes
Bicycle
Father
" I'm a late bloomer. "
Frank McCourt
Bloomer
Late Bloomer
Late
" My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born. "
Frank McCourt
New
Met
Born
" I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list. "
Frank McCourt
Book
Me
Say
" One day a week should be set aside for field trips. "
Frank McCourt
Field
Should
Trips
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Heights
New York
Me
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Self
Debt
Portrait
" 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
Brooklyn
Mother
Think
" I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book. "
Frank McCourt
I Think
Book
Title
" I knew I had to find my own way of teaching. "
Frank McCourt
Knew
Teaching
Own
" I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die. "
Frank McCourt
Humor
Think
Die
" I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from. "
Frank McCourt
I Came
Poverty
Came
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Work
Dressed
Apple
" Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow. "
Frank McCourt
Hard
Happiness
Recall
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Name
Mother
Hanging
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Own
Enough
Me
" They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun. "
Frank McCourt
Should
North
Me
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Adversity
People
Humor
" If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher. "
Frank McCourt
Teacher
Cause
" My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time. "
Frank McCourt
Years
Three
Mother
" 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. "
Frank McCourt
Think
Home
Me
" People come up to me and talk about the alcoholism in their family. "
Frank McCourt
People
Family
Come
" I didn't know you could write about yourself. Nobody ever told me about this. "
Frank McCourt
You
Write
Nobody
" We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people. "
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Stars
Enough
Generals
" 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
Place
Spring
Bed
" 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
Believe
God
Reading
" 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
People
Thought
Writing