I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself.

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror.

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

Self-confidence is not a fixed way of being. People are not born with certain levels of self-confidence, it can be acquired, and it can be lost.

Do you think to make man good by enacting more laws?

I am a product [...of] endless books.

The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.

The Chinese view us as an enemy, very, very militant toward the United States, and I don't even think the United States knows it.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

America is a business. If you can't afford to do something, no matter how much bellyaching everybody does I'm so sorry, if you can't afford it, you shouldn't do it.

I have to admit that Christina is good—though I don’t like giving credit to Candor smart-mouths—and so is Peter—though I don’t like giving credit to future psychopaths.

You are always cheating for the audience.