I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you're a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you'll win - if you don't, you won't.

It caused more problems as a young kid, because the simple process of perceiving words on a piece of paper was hard for me. Many people think dyslexic people see things backwards. They don't see things backwards.

The biggest problem with dyslexic kids is not the perceptual problem, it is their perception of themselves. That was my biggest problem.

If you are a kid, reading is really important stuff.

I didn't only have a perceptual problem, I was also so nervous and so upset. The process just didn't work. I lost enthusiasm for school and I flunked second grade. The teachers said I was lazy.

First of all, I try to be a positive role model.

I thought everybody else was doing much better than I was.

I always felt that my greatest asset was not my physical ability, it was my mental ability.

The truth is everybody does it from time to time. People dial telephone numbers and they get a wrong number only to find that they've read the last two digits backwards. Everybody does it, but dyslexics have this tendency to a higher degree.

If you're asking your kids to exercise, then you better do it, too. Practice what you preach.

If I wasn't dyslexic, I probably wouldn't have won the Games. If I had been a better reader, then that would have come easily, sports would have come easily... and I never would have realized that the way you get ahead in life is hard work.

If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit in the wire that goes between the eye and the brain. Reading is not a fluid process.

When the time comes for your brain to process the information, the second word comes up faster than the first one. So when it's in your head, all of a sudden, it comes out backwards and you think of the word backwards.

Our mission for younger people is to do our best to make exercise cool, hip - the thing to do.

We put so much pressure on kids to excel in school at such a young age.

I still have nightmares about taking tests.

Nobody has milked one performance better than me - and I'm damned proud of it.

I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you're a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you'll win - if you don't, you won't.

If you're going to dedicate every second to winning the decathlon, what are you doing wasting your time in bed?

Start early and begin raising the bar throughout the day.

I was growing up in the 50's and 60's. Back then they didn't even know what dyslexia was.

I spent twelve years training for a career that was over in a week. Joe Namath spent one week training for a career that lasted twelve years.

Waving the flag at the 1976 Olympics wasn't my idea. It was too much apple pie and ice cream. Not that I don't love my country, but I felt it was my victory up there, I put all the time into it.

The biggest problem with dyslexic kids is not the perceptual problem it is their perception of themselves.That was my biggest problem.

You have to train your mind like you train your body.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.

I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.