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.

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.

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.

How remorseless must one be find pleasure in riding a Wilhelmina golden coach in the 21st century.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.

If I had been at a University I don't think I would have been able to have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don't think I have been as successful

I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.

The first joint priority of the churches of any city should be that of making it hard for people to go to hell from that city.

The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.

Just curious. Does the president of the United States have any advice for other teenage boys in America? Wounded warriors, for example . . .

Art is a celebration of life, intended by the artist to put the spectator in touch with the divine.

ADVERSITY CAN HARDEN YOU. OR IT CAN LOOSEN YOU UP AND MAKE YOU BETTER —IF YOU LET IT.

If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.