Jayson Williams Quotes

When you go to prison, you don't feel like a superstar. It really humbles you as a person.

One of the things about jail that's weird is that you're sent to a place where you're supposed to sit there and think about your actions and their consequences and why you're there. And I think now, it turns more into - the minute you go there, it's just survival.

I'm not a fugitive anymore. Never will be in the future. After spending five years in jail, you learn your lesson. I never want to return there.

I felt very accomplished staying busy in prison.

Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

I hit rock bottom before I even went there. Actually, prison was the rescue mission that God had put on me. He sent out his angels to rescue me. In prison, he protected me the whole time I was in there, and it was just for me to get my will power back, to get my strength back, get my focus together.

One day between takes on the 'Oz' set, I went into one of the cells and laid down and dozed off. When I woke up, I thought I was back in a federal pen. But I did my time, and today no one is more of a free man than Chuck Zito.

If it wasn't for prison, I was in a bad way.

Prison matures you.

When I was locked up, I went through a big personal change with my attitude and spiritual, everything. I went through some major changes locked up.

I had to go to jail, which was probably the most humbling thing I've ever had to deal with in my life.

Prison gives you time to reflect.

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.

I was heading in a self destructive direction. My priority wasn't together, wasn't in order. So me getting locked up was actually a blessing for me. It helped for me to see the light. Once you get the rug snatched from under you - I had my career and family snatched from me, and I was forced to just sit there in that box for three years and think about what I did and how selfish I was, it made me really see things with new eyes, like, hold up, why was I doing that? What the hell was I thinking about? I gotta change. Something's got to give. I can't ever come back in this place again.

When I went to prison, for three years I didn't say a word to another human being until, going into the fourth year, when I realized, 'You know what, I have to find a way to live.'

When a person go to jail, what people don't realize is you're alive, but you're dead to the world. People forget about you. When you go to jail, you're a story.

I don't think people take enough time to themselves or like to be alone anymore, but it's really important.

I was incarcerated for a little while in Baltimore, and my celly was Muslim. I was watching him pray every day, and his outlook on getting out of that situation was a lot more positive than the other dudes that were Muslim in the jail.

At the age of 46, in my sixth prison term, it was the second prison I was in - California Rehabilitation Center. The California Civil Education program kind of opened up all of the experiences that that I had dealt with in my life, that I had experienced.

I didn't mind the 23 hours a day solitary confinement for the majority of the time, because after the first few years in prison, when I stopped being angry and started to like myself and understand myself, it was OK. I still enjoy my own company sometimes.

It took me three and a half years to go from being sentenced in federal court to going to the Oscars.

I feel like if I wasn't to go to jail, I probably wouldn't be the person I am - I wouldn't.

If I hadn't been in prison, maybe I wouldn't have gotten all those prison roles.