I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.

Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.

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.

Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.

Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to.