Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.

Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made. Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made.

I'm more optimistic about cycling right now than I've ever been.

I know I'll never feel that sensation of racing and winning again and that took a while to get used to. The Tour was a race I never thought I could lose.

More people should apologize, and more people should accept apologies when sincerely made.

It is cycling as a professional sport that represents the problem. It can transform someone into a liar.

I have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle it's not going to be satisfying.

Racing is a very selfish, self-centred, self-glorifying thing. My wife's life for 14 years was centered around me. It was all about me. It was all for my ego.

Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.

I know too that we Americans like to think of ourselves as cleaner than clean, a healthy nation who would never take anything when a recent poll suggested that 65 per cent of the population would risk dying in 10 years if they would be guaranteed Olympic gold.

Testing, we will never do enough of it.

There are so many people who have died of cycling, and that didn't happen when I was racing.

I know it is possible to win the Tour without taking anything.

You don't suffer, kill yourself and take the risks I take just for money. I love bike racing.

There are few things that you can't do as long as you are willing to apply yourself.

Even good people are obliged to deceive.

I rode in a nine-day charity ride recently, averaged 43km a day and still finished in the lead group. I'm 38, not quite finished yet.

I guess I'm a semi-retired person. I work out of my house. I'm a skier in the winter - downhill and cross country. I have a place in Montana for the down-hilling.

I love downtown Seattle. It's a city that has all of the outdoor activities and is still a very cosmopolitan city.

I used to trapshoot. I was actually a junior national champion. My parents are trapshooters, so I'm more into target stuff.

I want to tell the world of cycling to please join me in telling Pat McQuaid to resign. I have never seen such an abuse of power in cycling's history - resign, Pat, if you love cycling. Resign even if you hate the sport.

I've always thought that travelling every day as a journalist on the Tour's got to be harder than actually racing.

If people really want to clean the sport of cycling up, all you have to do is put your money where your mouth is.

Seattle is very similar to Minneapolis. I like the culture; I like the people. I raced a bike and won a national championship on Lake Washington in 1977, so I've had a connection there for a long time.

The physical demands of cycling is that it actually lowers your immune system, and you expose yourself to a tremendous amount of elements - so certain people might get a chronic overload and develop, say, bad asthma.

More people should apologize and more people should accept apologies when sincerely made.

Sincere apologies are for those that make them not for those to whom they are made. Sincere apologies are for those that make them not for those to whom they are made.

It never gets easier you just go faster.

There are few things that you cant do as long as you are willing to apply yourself.

Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.