Mary Archer 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 wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

Jail was terrible. It was a nightmare.

We have real cliched ideas of what prison life is like. It is not a happy place. It's a desperate, sad situation.

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.

I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.

I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

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.

No one cares about you when you're in jail.

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

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

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.