Prison experience puts distance between me and any person who hasn't been there, done that.

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.

At eighty-one, health club-lusting is as close as I'll ever come to getting laid again.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

People think I'm educated because I talk and write well, but the fact is I never finished high school. I've read a lot, is all.

Although I was simply what today would be called a "mule" - the bottom of the food chain in the drug biz - the federal system treated me from beginning to end like a major criminal, and I still don't know why, other than that in those days, 6.5 ounces of heroin was a big load. Ludicrous by today's standards, when coke, heroin, and weed are shipped across the border by the ton.