I believe, in my prime, I could have fought with anybody alive.

I have always adhered to two principles. The first one is to train hard and get in the best possible physical condition. The second is to forget all about the other fellow until you face him in the ring and the bell sounds for the fight.

I don't want to be remembered as a beaten champion.

Why waltz with a guy for 10 rounds if you can knock him out in one?

I believe, in my prime, I could have fought with anybody alive.

What could be better than walking down any street in any city and knowing you're the heavyweight champion of the world?

I was on my face. I heard the count from one to 10. I kept telling myself that I had to get up, but I couldn't move. I couldn't make myself move. It was the strangest feeling.

In the ring, I never really knew fear.

One who picks on you because he’s bigger than you is like most big bullies: if you can stay away and make him miss for a few rounds he’ll get frustrated. Once you strip away that feeling of invincibility, he can be had.

I have that special sort of novelist body of knowledge which is extraordinarily wide and very, very shallow. So I can usually answer the questions on 'Jeopardy,' but never the bonus question.

Children need love especially when they do not deserve it.

I think I have a pattern of nice and lovely and then dark and twisted.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Almost every media organization is doing something with live events now, and that's because they feel they can break through that way.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

Some readers took 'Heaven's My Destination' as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

People are willing to do the most appalling things to another person for the sake of imposing a religious belief.

Play with your physical workplace in a way that sends positive body language to employees and visitors.

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

Make your life a mission, not an intermission.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

It's easy to have the wrong type of people around you.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

You know as far as diet goes, for a while I was really obsessed with counting fat grams along with the rest of the world.

Football needs its roots, it needs its connection with the supporters. But those in charge seem to think they can do without them.

My dad actually taught me to box when I was, like, nine years old, because I got picked on at school all of the time. I was on a boys' hockey team, so I would get all of my aggression out there.

Marathons are good training goals.

Well, I think I was always sort of reflecting where I was and my sense of surroundings and ecology, urban or country, or foreign, living in Europe, very affected by all of that.

I didn't have a cup of coffee until I was 27.

You become the movie you are making.

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score

True expression is hard when performing opera. The problem is that opera relies on the dramatic context of the piece. It can be interpreted and represented, but there are guidelines; there is a vocabulary within the pieces that you must know objectively and reflect.