Truman Capote Quotes

Death Row is the same every day - breakfast at 3 A.M., lunch at 10 A.M., dinner at 3 P.M.

Prison is no hardship, really. I'm in the art room as an assistant to the tutor, and basically, I'm doing what I like.

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

Death row was the only place where I never witnessed racism. We all went to bed with a death sentence on our heads and woke up that way. We had to become each other's support system.

The guns on the walls that surround the prison accurately, though unwittingly, index the true character of the penitentiary in our day.

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

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'?

To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

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.

The only thing worse than working acting in an airplane is working in a prison - they're cold, and the clanging and the noise, it just gets under your skin after a week.

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.

I relate to any prison movie, as long as it has some authenticity.

The world is itself but a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution.

Being in jail is difficult too because it's like being in a graveyard, you can't do much.

It's [Jail's] like being at school. Except you can't leave.

According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take "a harder stance" on the death penalty. What's a harder stance on the death penalty? We're already killing the guy? How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?

Even behind bars, even on Death Row, you can fail up, because life is about committing ourselves on a daily basis to the best in us. Freedom is a state of mind. Freedom is an attitude. Freedom is a spirit. You may be behind bars, but you still have the capacity to be free.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The good thing about a jail show is nobody gets up and walks out.

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell. May your walls fall and may I live to tell.

Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.