Frank McCourt Quotes

It has been stressful to be a French resident in America.

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.

A lot of the Indians who came to North America in the '70s, and who made very successful adjustments, always had an idea of the India that they had left, not realizing that the India that they had left has changed more profoundly than the America they came to.

I always thought that the U.S. was just amazing, and it was just a dream. I thought it was Heaven. Coming here a couple years ago, you know, the U.S. is still nice, but it's not like what I thought it was going to be.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

The first years of my life in the U.S. were very difficult.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.

I couldn't achieve the American dream in Japan.

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

I don't think any of us grew up into the world we were hoping for or expecting.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

You expect certain things. You build up in your mind how it's supposed to go down. When you get a record deal, you think you're supposed to get X, Y, and Z. It doesn't happen like that. You're like 'Oh, this isn't as exciting as I thought it was going to be.'

My mother was an immigrant from Lebanon to the United States. She came when she was 18 years old in 1920.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

I'm not by nature a cynical person. But sometimes your expectations are different from reality.

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.

When I came to America, I had some surprises at first, but I could soon adjust.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

When I first came to this country I was this new kid from the Caribbean. England was a rude awakening for me.