Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.

Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer-but nothing ever, ever happened.

It was like she'd become the sun, and I started revolving around her. She was my center.

HIV/AIDS has no boundaries.

Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.

In long-term relationships ... we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness ... we confront the challenge of sustaining both--without losing either.

Politics is like roller skating. You go partly where you want to go, and partly where the damn things take you.

My dad used to flush my mother's head down the toilet. I was so screwed up.

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.

There really is something irresistible about a lost cause.

Think about laughing and laugh about thinking.