All those smells... and the kids, we were the great unwashed... nobody ever knew what a shower was... We washed maybe from eyebrow to chin, week after week after week. Our crotches were innocent of water.

Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?

If ever you are to be visited by the Holy Ghost, you should make certain you're sitting beside a fireman.

For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.

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

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.