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

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.

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.

The overall result was drift punctuated by protest.

I would say I don't like people who are really into themselves or are very materialistic. Just always talking themselves up. Not being real is the pet peeve. Be true to yourself.

Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

In West Virginia, we're all family. We know how firefighters and policemen honor their own and we feel our miners deserve to be honored in a similar way.

All results of the profoundest mathematical investigation must ultimately be expressible in the simple form of properties of the integers.

Working out and working as an actor have gone hand in hand—I always feel more prepared if I know I have done a workout. It gives me confidence—and peace of mind.

Why don't you bring your face up here and let me punch it? Then you can tell me (if I'm stronger).

The very idea of carrying my memory into eternity devastated me, and I took refuge in atheism.

I like to play small clubs.

People in misery is what most important in art.