Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They tell me I'm on 'Politically Incorrect' with Ollie North. That should be a lot of fun.
I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'
We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.
You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
I've had experiences on both sides of the ocean and various classrooms and bedrooms around New York.
My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.
There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.
I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.
My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.
If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room.
Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That's where I got the nerve.
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.
Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.
Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.
I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin.
Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it's the one part of you the world can't interfere with.
They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow they'd be lost forever.
We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.
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.
Love her as in childhood Through feeble, old and grey. For you’ll never miss a mother’s love Till she’s buried beneath the clay.
You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.
I couldn't even pick up the newspaper without saying, 'This is a fine piece of writing. I wish to hell I could write like this.'
I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.
I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.
A mother's love is a blessing No matter where you roam. Keep her while you have her, You'll miss her when she's gone -- Angela's Ashes.
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
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.'
I say, Billy, what’s the use in playing croquet when you’re doomed? He says, Frankie, what’s the use of not playing croquet when you’re doomed?
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe in happiness anyway... it's too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was a houseman, the lowest. I was just above - in the hierarchy of jobs, I was just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers - just above, so I felt superior to them.
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.
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.
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.