Prodigy Quotes

Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

Incarceration didn't change me. In many ways, incarceration galvanized me. The totality of the experience helped me.

Most people are fascinated by what I did as a teenager, but when I look back at my life, I don't think very much about those years. I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

I started seeing how I wanted my story to be told. Going to jail is one of the best things that happened to me. It helped me get my mind right.

Going to prison actually helped save my life, I believe.

I look at my life today at 69 and I think about all the things that have happened after all my imprisonment. We truly live in an amazing country, America is where you can do things and pay your debt back to society and literally change your life if you want to.

I feel like my life has been a series of miracles. I was in every sense a lost cause.

I was a punk. I think that's why I'm such a good person now, because I was such a bad guy then.

I was a young kid; I did a little time in the Billerica House of Correction, and it basically turned my life around because I said, 'Oh, I'll never be locked up again. They're not taking away my privacy.' So I flipped a coin: heads - Miami, tails -California.

I was in jail a couple of times, and I was probably heading back there for a long time. But martial arts saved my life and some of the choices I made with it.

My father tells me I would have been a criminal or a kick-boxer. But fatherhood has changed me - a lot.

When a person gets to the age of 35 and you go to jail, it either makes you or breaks you. It made me identify what I wanted.

When I got to jail, it was a blessing in disguise because it made me reevaluate and check who I am as a person.

In the past two years, I've started the process of becoming a new man. I am much chastened and profoundly remorseful over the reckless and hurtful things I have done in my life, especially those which have brought me before you today.

Redemption means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong. So I think a lot of people get hooked on drugs and when they get over that addiction they go out and they try to talk to kids and they try to work in rehab centers.

I cleaned up. I quit drinking, I quit doing drugs, I quit stealing, I quit breaking into houses, I tried to quit being a bad human being. I developed a conscience later in life than many. I call it the lost-time-regained dynamic.

It sounds kind of strange, but Jail time was almost a good experience for me.

Most of my life I've had long periods of feeling down and lost. That's why every five years or so I've smashed my life to pieces and started again.

I had such a wonderful life before drugs and alcohol abuse. I've got that life back now and plan to keep it. Maybe I had to go through what I did to get to this point, to appreciate this life more.

If I were to try to identify a turning point I'd say that was it - getting clean.

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

At 32, I kind of thought I was past the point where I was gonna get a break that really changed my life overnight.

After years of making wrong decisions in my life, in 1977 I found out that it was all right to be square, simple, and sober.

First, I have to thank God for giving me the gift that he did as well as a second chance for a better life.