"I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled."
— Scott Westerfeld (The Last Days)

"The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable."
— Karl Kraus

"I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison."
— Daniil Kharms (Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms)

"Never do anything you are ashamed of and you'll never have to lie."
— Robert J Gagnon

"The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity."
— Jack Henry Abbott (In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison)

"I was kind of excited to go to jail for the first time and I learnt some great dialogue."
— Quentin Tarantino

"It was when I was in a police cell at the C.I.D. (Central Intelligence Division) headquarters in Lagos; the cell I was in named "The Kalakuta Republic" by the prisoners. I found out when I went to East Africa that "Kalakuta" is a Swahili word that means "rascal." So if rascality is going to get us what we want, we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we have to be rascally with them."
— Fela Anikulapo Kuti

"During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.

On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody."
— Alan Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned)

"Most doctors are prisoners of their education and shackled by their profession."
— Richard Diaz

"We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it."
— Norman Mailer (In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison)

"Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves."
— Jack Henry Abbott (In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison)

"I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf."
— Jack Henry Abbott (In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison)

"Body is a home, a prison and a grave."
— James Runcie (The Colour of Heaven)

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
"
— Thomas Jefferson

""I need a kid like I need a bad heart. A pretty kid is a ticket to trouble... and I'm too old to ask for that. Shit, I haven't even booked Tommy the Face in two years. I'm turning into a jack-off idiot.""
— Edward Bunker (The Animal Factory)