Frank McCourt Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Frank McCourt:

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.

I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.

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.

Frank McCourt

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

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

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

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

Frank McCourt

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

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

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

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.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

Frank McCourt

St. Patrick, bringing the religion to Ireland, this is what we should celebrate.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt

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

I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.

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'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

When I was a teacher, I'd walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed operations. I was an intellectual and artistic and moral traffic cop, and I - and I would direct the class, most of the time.

Frank McCourt

I hated school in Ireland.

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

Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.

Frank McCourt

I don't know anything about a stock!

Frank McCourt

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.

Frank McCourt

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

We were supposed to stay over in Boston, but when Scribners heard I'd won the Pulitzer, they told me to get on a plane - that Katie Couric wanted my body. And when Katie Couric wants your body, you get moving right away.

Frank McCourt

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

Frank McCourt

On the last day of my teaching career, I was sitting in my apartment, having a glass of wine, thinking I'm glad I did it, that I had been somehow useful, that I had learned something.

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'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 think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

Frank McCourt

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

Frank McCourt