My published works are concrete evidence that I exist.

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.

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 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.

A breath of laughter will blow a Government out of existence in Paris much more effectually than a whiff of cannon-smoke

Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.

My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren't rich - but we felt secure.

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

Since I was a little kid, I did like fairy tale. I did dress up like Little Red Riding Hood. My mom had to make me a cape.

Even nowadays some people see me as a "vreemde eend in de bijt" [translated literally as the strange duck in the pond. In other words, an outsider].

You can't take care of yourself.

If I can't get a mental image from the song, I won't sing it.

American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away.

My generation in the UK, they're very apathetic, a lot of them.