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

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.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

I played basketball to try to get my parents from working so hard.

My first-ever date on my first tour, the sound completely cut out. So I had to go on and just shout loudly to the audience.

It's hard asking someone with a broken heart to fall in love again.

There are conservative people in all colours in America.

Home - that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel's wings.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

I had many teachers that were great, positive role models and taught me to be a good person and stand up and be a good man. A lot of the principals they taught me still affect how I act sometimes and it's 30 years later.

Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was, and he didn't require consultants or gurus to change him.

The situation in the region is flammable and may explode at any moment, because of the crucial events and because of the absence of justice in executing the international legitimacy resolutions, regarding the Israeli Arab cause and the oppression on Palestinians by Israelis.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world.

I'm so lucky that 'The Vampire Diaries' happened. I'm so lucky that Warner Bros. pays me money. You have no idea. I should be on a fishing boat with my dad.

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

Washington is a place where politics and economics often aren't on speaking terms.

I'm not sure I could write a straight urban fantasy any more than I could write a straight contemporary story. I would end up being intimidated by all the small details.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.

I recurred on 'Grey's Anatomy' for three years, and at the same time, I recurred for eight episodes on 'Rescue Me'. And I'd recurred for nine episodes on 'The Practice'. Frankly, the guest star is often the most compelling character.

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

The most important role of a leader is to set a clear direction, be transparent about how to get there and to stay the course.

Personal relationships are the fertile soil from which all advancement, all success, all achievement in real life grows.

My love for artichokes comes from when I was very young. My mother and father would slice the hearts and fry them, and they would be crispy around the leaves and tender at the base.

The homegrown terrorists are the most significant because any fighter returning from Syria to the United States would likely be identified and detected by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Even though I wanted to be John Malkovich or Sean Penn when I was a kid, mostly I was a music nerd.

Your thoughts and emotions are yours alone.