I can say now is that sneaking up on people is a major delight in my old age, but it always has been. A desire, even a need, to shock.

I was addicted to amphetamines at the time I got busted, but I tend to think I was on a determined, self-destruct course that had little to do with the effect of Benzedrine.

I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties.

I couldn't stand living in a society that admires the emperor's new clothes, when I see so clearly that he is naked.

I had a naïve idea that if I could tell the story, people would be outraged and do something about conditions in the jails.

My published works are concrete evidence that I exist.

My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."