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.

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.

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.

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.

If money is spent in the wrong way, then ‘control’ the spending and if the money is spent in the right way, then ‘decontrol’ the spending.

They say: 'Seek wisdom while you have the strength, or you may lose the strength without gaining wisdom.

And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

Relationships are possible, but are definitely not a road paved with roses.

Are you sulking?” “Me? No. I don’t sulk.” “You sound like you’re sulking.” “I’m just waiting for the violent urges to subside.

Anyone who minimizes the importance of success to your future has given up on his or her own chances of accomplishment and is spending his or her life trying to convince others to do the same.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

Local television and local TV news isn't telling the voters about local candidates.