I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

In fifty years of covering the sport, of course Muhammad Ali is by far the dominant figure.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero.

Sportswriters have changed more than sportswriting.

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

I just can't believe all the things I did that decade.

If I got paid, it was no more than five dollars a column, and I still think I was overpaid.

I was also in love with the English language.

I wanted to be a sportswriter because I loved sports and I could not hit the curve ball, the jump shot, or the opposing ball carrier.

I worked with Rocky Graziano and Rocky was certainly a character.

I began learning the sportswriting business very early in life.

Sugar Ray and talked about doing some articles together or writing a book together but dealing with Sugar Ray was a lot like fighting him. He would fake you in and then he'd drop you.

I got to know Sugar Ray but I certainly would not say we were good friends.

I think on balance, Don King has been bad for boxing. I think he's done some very good things and I think he did a heck of a job of promoting Ali but I think I could have promoted Ali.

I did not choose necessarily on the basis of significance. If you have a vote for the most significant athlete, then you have Ali, then you have Babe Ruth, then you have Michael Jordan.

Some people who love boxing might love Mike Tyson, but people outside of the sport are generally repulsed by him and therefore, repulsed by the sport.

I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader.

My top three were Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Bo Jackson.

Sugar Ray Robinson was at the top of the boxing world during the 1950's when it seemed that he would either win or lose the championship about every three or four months.

Today, it's money. There's no question about that. Unless you endorse a grill that cooks hamburgers and steaks, where else can you make the kind of money that you can make in the ring if you're good?

My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

Also, I am driven by a wonderful muse called alimony.

Sugar Ray Leonard was as close as anyone came after Ali to being Ali, but he wasn't Ali.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

Let's have some new cliches.

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

I would rather read a poorly structured story that has fresh ideas than a tightly structured one with cliches.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

Most of my cliches aren't original.

We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.

The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

You need cliches. Cliches are what people respond to.

I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

Cliches are what make you understand something.

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.

Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them.

The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.