Frank McCourt Quotes

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Frank McCourt

Profession : Author

Birth : August 19, 1930

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.

Frank McCourt

I never really fit in anywhere.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

Every life is a mystery. There is nobody whose life is normal and boring.

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

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

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

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

Frank McCourt

I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.

Frank McCourt

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?'

Frank McCourt

I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York.

Frank McCourt

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

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

Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to.

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