“There is no such thing as 'just one last cigarette' – except the last cigarette that you've already had.”

“The worst of all was to be faced with the interrogation technique of Thirty Seconds. The interrogator would say something and you had to respond quickly, without once repeating yourself or using the personal pronoun. Very few dissidents could last the full thirty seconds, and a refusal to comply was taken as equal proof of dissidence.”

“There's nowhere else to escape to ... Except in a wooden box, that is.”

“There was a great joke that was forever doing the rounds in the jail and it was probably funny not because it had a humorous punchline but because it was so very true at a deep psychological level. Put anyone in that jail and soon enough they'd actually become a cruel, twisted, sadistic and heartless thug. And some of the prisoners were just as bad.”

“Is that a banana in your lunch box, or are you just pleased to see me?”

“Maybe like the never-ending stories within stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, life is dream within dream all the way through?”

“These technical impediments [... things like ignorance, impatience, unexamined assumptions, habit ...] get in the way of what would otherwise occur or develop quite naturally, such as wakefulness, awareness, inspiration and infallible intuition. Things that should be our birth right. This preliminary stage, then, we call learning how to learn.”