Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral.

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

As a kid I was deeply curious as to what college life would be like. Now that I am a university professor, I realize that this was a premonition that once I entered college I would never get out, and that my matriculation would turn into some sort of life sentence.