I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

I was addicted to amphetamines at the time I got busted, but I tend to think I was on a determined, self-destruct course that had little to do with the effect of Benzedrine.

Prison experience puts distance between me and any person who hasn't been there, done that.

I was already a wreck when I went in, and prison nearly destroyed what little was left of me. I was worse when I came out than I was when I went in, and was not positively changed in any way.

One of the principle things life has taught me is that we always have a choice. When we say we "can't," we usually mean we're just not willing to pay the price.

My published works are concrete evidence that I exist.

The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.

I had a naïve idea that if I could tell the story, people would be outraged and do something about conditions in the jails.

My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.

I can say now is that sneaking up on people is a major delight in my old age, but it always has been. A desire, even a need, to shock.

Shoot for the moon, even if you fail, you'll land among the stars

Friends are the sunshine of life.

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

Women are tough, but sometimes women present toughness in different ways.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

I don't want to hurt anybody or be offensive. But I don't want to not be me.

Before we met, I was as lost as a person could be and yet you saw something in me that somehow gave me direction again.