Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.