As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

I have been desperate to escape for so many years now, it is routine for me to try to escape.

I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror.

I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.

When I'm forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it's all I can do to refrain from attack.

The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.

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.

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill.

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.

Nothing is over and done with. Nothing. Not even your malice.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

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.

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

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

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.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

Well, after I had the heart attack, it was a very simple choice. What the doctor told me I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean I stayed away from everything.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

There's nothing worse than talking about yourself to find out that you're not that interesting.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

If nothing is to be done in the given situation, he must invent plausible reasons for doing nothing; and if something must be done, he must suggest the something. The unpardonable sin is to propose nothing, when action is imperative.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment - and nothing more corrupting.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

I think I had a more European outlook about the body and sex. The body is in no way dirty, and sex is something beautiful to give to and share with a lover. It has nothing to do with promiscuity, because I only believe in being in love with one man at a time.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

There ain't nothing from the outside that can lick any of us.

Love is seeing without eyes, hearing without ears; hatred is nothing.

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

There's nothing better than good sex. But bad sex? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than bad sex.

I'd rather attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed.

Bright light is injurious to those who see nothing.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

You either love or you hate. You live in the middle, you get nothing.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

I don't know nothing about communism. But I know the Albanians loved me. Same reason as anyone else loves me. Because I made them laugh.