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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I began to look at other religions, Buddhism and so on, and realized there is another way of looking at life. A more benign way of looking at life.
I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.
I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food.
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.
I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
I was beginning to think that you could somehow miraculously dig down into your memory and bring back stuff that is stored there.
I will have the faith... not the faith they want me to have, but another kind of faith which is of my own invention.
I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
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.
I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.
It's not just Catholic versus Protestant any more. I read somewhere that in any construction site in Belfast, they have protection rackets. And you have to clear your trucking with the IRA, just like the Mafia here.
My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.
My mother died in New York... she was cremated, and we took her ashes to Ireland one week and scattered the ashes on her family's gravesite.
Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit farfetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too farfetched.
Something happened to the spirit in the famine, and they retreated into their caverns and into themselves. And they haven't come out.
The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.
The poverty and the influence of the church were very damaging. It damaged all of us emotionally. To be poor deprives you of self-esteem.
The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
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.
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
We were just slogging on from day to day and making the best of it. But with a light at the end of the tunnel... AMERICA!
When I first came to New York and saw Italian families and their displays of affection, I was taken aback a bit because it was uninhibited.
You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.
You know how it is in Hollywood, everybody kisses everybody. It's a handshake in Ireland. And a kind of tentativeness. Except when it's mothers and small children.
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