Taryn Manning Quotes

When you're in prison, and we're left to our own devices, you're stripped of everything, and you really get to see who these people are, the good and the bad.

I was always shocked in prison because it's a scary place. It's not natural to lock that many people up like that, in such a tiny place. There's something disturbing about it.

What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

As an actor, I have to watch people and observe their behaviors - this is how I create characters.

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.

Watch people do their most common actions; these are indeed the things that will tell you the real character of a great person.

The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.

In a way, a jail is a place where you can rest, read books and live with yourself.

What are you doing here?” [ndr prison] Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I said. “Want some? The Samoas are terrific.” (Max II to Max)

Johnny Storm is such an iconic character. There's a lot of personality traits and things to him that people are really going to look forward to seeing.

Well, on a personal level, I would never want to take on a character who didn’t have some redeemable qualities. Even the worst of people, such as Michael Scott in The Office [Carell’s character in the US version of the Ricky Gervais sitcom], have some decent human qualities that you can latch onto.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

One of my younger homies, he went to jail, and some people came to me and were like, "Bail him out," and I said no. Why would I bail him out? He's going to prison. Let him sit and get some time served. You want to be crazy, but you don't want to go to jail. You want to shoot people, but you don't want to kill people. That's such a misleading thing.

I've always believed in populating my films with characters who we like, who we have some warmth for, who have warmth for each other, who we would like to hang out with, who we emulate in one way or another. It's not that they all get along, or that there aren't bad people or people we make fun of. But at the core, there's a kind of sweetness.

A Catholic priest who’s been sending threatening notes to Conan O’Brien was charged with stalking in the fourth degree. It just goes to show you that people can become obsessed with redheads.

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

It's cool because you get to see that some of these women are there because they should be. They're actually not good people to be in society. And then, other people are there because they just made a really retarded mistake.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

Listen to me, convict. I have not traveled all this way to listen to your war stories. So shut your trap before I shut it for you. Commander Julius Root

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.