If you're not in it you can't win it.

For kids it's natural to be competitive.

If you're not in it you can't win it.

Most people doing the decathlon these days are quite boring, so people don't relate to them.

When I lost my decathlon world record I took it like a man. I only cried for ten hours.

Sport fosters many things that are good; teamwork and leadership.

But if kids take up things like hockey and football they will go back to it.

Being a decathlete is like having ten girlfriends. You have to love them all, and you can't afford losing one.

We live in the best place on earth but at times the worst.

Athletes these days are too robotic. People like to see performances filled with emotion. In my career I tried to be amusing, to differentiate myself from the other champions.

Even if you've been involved in a World Cup, the Olympics is huge. Only the Games has the power to change communities.

Having the ambition of becoming Olympic champion is a whole different ambition from wanting to be the greatest.

I am only about winning and getting better.

I have the mentality of a winner. I first went to the Olympic Games when I was 17, three weeks after my O-levels, and I remember sitting in a dining-hall filled with the world's best athletes.

I tend to eat vegetables only when I'm with the kids and the rest of the time, I'm a bit slack. But, I am weight-conscious, so I concentrate on avoiding junk food.

I think one of the things about being a good coach is to recognise when you have given all that you can. In fact there should be some sort of unspoken law that says that a coach cannot have anyone for three or four years - if you have not passed on most of the stuff you know in that time, then you are not doing a good job.

I wouldn't swap the era I competed in for anything, not a day of it. I started out as an amateur, and people like myself, Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Tessa Sanderson and the rest did it for the glory of winning medals for our country.

I'm competitive - that's what defines me - and I love it.

I'm obsessive. I want to know the answer to how good I am. Most people aren't.

I've still got a small fitness and conditioning business where I travel round the world doing stuff for individuals and corporations, mainly fitness training.

If you work hard in real life, people tend to get in your way - either from inertia or prejudice - and they stop you achieving things. It's the worst thing about real life compared with sports, where you generally get what you deserve: if you're the fastest guy, you win; there are no other games being played.

Kids have been let down by adults - we've tried to give them too much, we've tried not to impose discipline. We've tried to make their lives easier and, in doing so, we've taken something away from them. Kids like boundaries, they also like to be pushed, need to learn what failure is all about, need guidance.

People don't want to serve apprenticeships any more. Kids expect to be paid and treated really well and all that guff before they've achieved anything. It doesn't work like that. You have to spend five or six years being relatively rubbish and put up with it. For that you don't deserve to be getting lottery money.

Retiring was hard. I'd spent 15 years doing something I loved, but when you get older everything seems to go. When I started spending too long with the physio and the doctor, I knew it was time to call it a day. But I had no preparation for being retired and I didn't know what to do.

Sometimes you have to resist working on your strengths in favour of your weaknesses. The decathlon requires a wide range of skills.

The stopwatch doesn't lie. The tape measure doesn't lie.

There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.

There's no day when I don't think it would be great to be 25 years old and have the Olympics coming in less than 300 days - and be the best in the world. I can't think of anything so motivating.

We crave instant success these days. If you are a really good sprinter and long jumper, you don't want to spend two or three years on a whole new set of events. You're used to doing well and it's difficult to give that up.

The only limitations are mental. The guy who thinks positively will win.

I consider myself to be an international woman.

I talk to my kids about my mother's energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were.

If you really want to be a rebel get a job, cut your grass, read your bible, and shut up. Because no one is doing that.

There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen.

Cooking and gardening involve so many disciplines: math, chemistry, reading, history.

Who knows what happens tomorrow? We'll find it tomorrow.

Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.

See a pin and pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck; see a pin and let it lie, bad luck you'll have all day

With a bad script and even the best cast, the most you can hope for is to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

In Yellowstone National Park, there are more 'do not feed the animals' signs than there are animals you might wish to feed.

A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a one-time huge, but solvable problem.

Rise in great might to fulfill your special specific mission.

Keep wondering whether your waking reality is a dream and you will wake up to the real.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

The next thing that happened to me was that I, we, were living in Paris where I then grew up.

There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will prompt them to investigate its activities more closely.

If I were president of the United States, I'd build a great wall along the Mexican border and not let anybody in.