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

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.

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

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.

Freedom of the mind is the most important liberty we have. Our belief in God’s grace gives us that freedom.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

Self-consciousness is hell.

I would like to be going all over the kingdom...and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!

Experience has always shown, and reason also, that affairs which depend on many seldom succeed.

I do think I have a rebellious, metal-loving rock chick inside of me.

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.

There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.