Prison Break Quotes

“It's when you feel worse, that's when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“The grille of the Caddie plunged right into the middle of the bonfire, scattering smoke and flames and bones to the wind. The Cadillac finally bounced and jolted to a stop among a rain of burning human skulls.

The voice of John Fogerty garbled and died. The driver's door opened and John flung himself out, clutching a sawed-off shotgun. He screamed, 'DID SOMEBODY ORDER SOME FUCKING PRISON BREAK WITH A SIDE OF SHOTGUN?”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“Writing turns everybody into wussies. Everybody quits.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“A committed escaper! One who never for a minute doubts that a man cannot live behind bars—not even as the most comfortable of trusties, in the accounts office, in the Culture and Education Section, or in charge of the bread ration. One who once he lands in prison spends every waking hour thinking about escape and dreams of escape at night. One who has vowed never to resign himself, and subordinates every action to his need to escape. One for whom a day in prison can never be just another day; there are only days of preparation for escape, days on the run, and days in the punishment cells after recapture and a beating.

A committed escaper! This means one who knows what he is undertaking. One who has seen the bullet-riddled bodies of other escapers on display along the central tract. He has also seen those brought back alive—like the man who was taken from hut to hut, black and blue and coughing blood, and made o shout: "Prisoners! Look at what happened to me! It can happen to you, too!" He knows that a runaway's body is usually too heavy to be delivered to camp. And that therefore the head alone is brought back in a duffel bag, sometimes (this is more reliable proof, according to the rulebook) together with the right arm, chopped off at the elbow, so that the Special Section can check the fingerprints and write the man off.

A committed escaper! It is for his benefit that window bars are set in cement, that the camp area is encircled with dozens of strands of barbed wire, towers, fences, reinforced barriers, that ambushes and booby traps are set, that red meat is fed to gray dogs.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“All I want is to be in a place I’m not trying to get out of.”
― Richard Stark, Breakout

“In prose, when you wrote something, it's symphonic… There's something ethereal in that process that's euphoric.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“The Hollywood process is a living thing and you get used to that.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“There's a story you write, there's a story you shoot and there's a story you cut.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“As a writer, you're the guy in the box. You're creating and you have these euphorias.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“With prose, I know where I'm starting and I think I know where I'm going.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“It's a great euphoria when you reach that writing zone.”
― Paul T. Scheuring, The Far Shore

“[At Eastham, probably after sexual abuse]: In Barrow's own words to Fults, 'I'd like to shoot all these damned guards and turn everybody loose.' Fults, initially unimpressed by the diminutive Barrow, later noted the change he witnessed. 'I seen him change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake. He got real bitter.' ... This is echoed by members of the Barrow family who noted a distinct difference in Barrow's personality after his 1932 parole. According to his sister Marie, 'Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde