Author

I can do no more than tell the truth.

When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.

At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.

Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.

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.

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.

My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

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.

My father and mother should have stayed in New York, where they met and married and where I was born.

I never really fit in anywhere.

I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

The part of Limerick we lived in is Georgian, you know, those Georgian houses. You see them in pictures of Dublin.

My sister died in Brooklyn.

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

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.

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

And, of course, they've always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.

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