I could have completely lost my mind or became a junkie or abandoned all sense and judgment and committed some rash, stupid act that would have sent me right back into the cage. Instead, I chose to be happy - but not so much for the sake of happiness as for spite.

If I’d been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I’d merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching.

Plenty of people have bad divorces, but few of them end up with cancer, imprisonment, and public scorn. In the dark, rolling, treacherous wake of that sunken ship, the last thing I sought was a "relationship" or, heaven forbid, marriage.

I've realized there are far more efficient and devastating methods of disturbing people than merely sloshing around in the pigpen with obvious, profane, scatological, flat-brained, grade-school offensiveness.

Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact.

I've noticed that if you spend ten years without shooting dope, people consider you an ex-junkie, but one never is considered an 'ex-woman-beater.'

My crazy parents and those crazy Catholic nuns didn't do a good job of forcing me to keep the Ten Commandments, but they kept me forever fixated on the very idea of a taboo.