Frank McCourt Quotes

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

I didn't want to be the daughter of the crazy people.

For me, the interesting thing about anorexia is that you show your wound. There's no hiding it. So my anger and sense of disappointment, all the stuff I was out of touch with, became this visible rebuke to my parents.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it's true.

When I do documentaries, my best information ends up on the cutting-room floor. People have trouble dealing with sexual honesty.

I adored my birth father and constantly worried that I was being disloyal to him and his schoolteacher roots if I spent too much time performing and enjoying it.

The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

God, it sucks to disappoint your parents, even at forty-two years old.

I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.

There's a reason why people who've had bad relationships with their parents listen to angry stuff.

If I'm censoring for anyone, it's for my parents. They are very old-fashioned and moral people. They still don't understand me that well.

I became the unnatural son of a few score of beaten men.

Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was 'call attention to yourself,' or 'think you were smart.' My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson's disease.

Sometimes I hid my family connections.

If I refused to get married, my parents would be brokenhearted and confused. Like any child close to her parents, I could not watch them suffer.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

You must be a terrible burden to your mother. I am feeling so sorry for her not to have a proper daughter." Mrs. Apusenja - To the Nines

I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.

Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy, or one with less heart than I have!