“Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.”

“I think that's why you see so many Americans in Dublin look so sad: they are looking for the door through which they can begin to understand this place. I tell them, 'Go to the races.' I think it's the best place to start understanding the Irish.”

“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.”

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

“When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.”

“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.”

“Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.”

“The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.”

“I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.”

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

“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.”