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

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.

I think I made more money when I was lifeguarding at 15 years old than I did on my first year at 'SNL.'

BoomTown has long been a big fan of Martha Stewart.

Sometimes, when there's too much traffic clogging up the road, you need to take a different route. But following the same path as everyone else can stall your progress in reaching your investment goals too.

Why is it braver to be a single mother versus being with a partner? Being in a couple and having a child could be more challenging because there might be conflict if the male partner cannot understand the extreme attachment a woman feels when she has a child.

Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That's when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers.

I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.

I'll always dance for fun, but for work? I've done it, dude.

I'm in love with the city. You can impress an Australian with a city, but you can't impress them with a beach.

We're not trying to take back our country. We are our country.

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.

You've got to keep taking certain risks, because my priority is in acting, it's not in movie stardom.

I'm very proud of the auto industry in Michigan.

Nine per cent of my viewers are men, of which the majority is, I think, 45 to 50. I like to tell myself it's just my dad watching.

I'm always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.

I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.

I think about death. I don't want to die with clothes in the cleaners.

A lot of Republicans are white Christians, but the Republican Party is reaching out to Hispanics, and reaching out to blacks, and reaching out to Asians.

English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. It's the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.

I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.

I have already seen death, and I know that death is supporting me in my cause of education. Death does not want to kill me.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.

If you really want to be able to express what goes on with other people, you have to be able to look at them and empathize with them and not judge who they are and what they do.