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

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.

I was surprised that the TV series was popular itself, but after that it went on to become more popular over the years and thus it seemed eventually that they would turn it into a movie.

I prefer to remember the happy things over 10 years, the things that went well. Let me see, what did go well?

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

I think I've become a much better singer and a much better player. Years and years of playing a couple of hours every day will do that.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.

The Republicans claim they are for strengthening Pell grants when the truth is that over the last four years, their legislation has done the exact opposite.

I want to thank all the fans for their support over the years. Keep supporting the Knicks, we're moving in the right direction here and we will be exciting to watch and competing against the best in the NBA. Come back to the Garden for those exciting games.

I am told that there have been over the years a number of experiments taking place in places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology that have been entirely based on concepts raised by Star Trek.

I couldn't sleep for two years, they tried to break my nerves. They used a lot of psychology to brainwash.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

We started filming in 1993 which was only four years after the fall of communism. The difference in Budapest over the last five years has been remarkable.

I had a wonderful time with the Stones but after 31 years, I thought it was time to move on.

The average life spans of many bands are not that long, up to five years if they are lucky.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

Plan Colombia was supposed to reduce Colombia's cultivation and distribution of drugs by 50 percent, but 6 years and $4.7 billion later, the drug control results are meager at best.

So the guy that we're really targeting our system at this year is one of the guys who brought a 16bit system three or four years ago and has pretty much had it with that, and he's ready to buy something new.

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

I have everything I had 20 years ago, only it's all a little lower.

Confidence comes from hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.