“My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.”

Don’t let fatigue make a coward of you.

As far as being a coach, it’s always fascinated me. It’s a greater responsibility than most people give it credit for because you’re dealing with people.

What kind of crazy nut would spend two or three hours a day just running?

A race is a work of art.

If you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

Kids made fun of me because I was a slow learner, because I was hyperactive, because of a lot of things. Running gave me confidence.

A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more.

The idea of losing the three at Hayward Field and the idea of losing my specialty to someone who wasn’t running his specialty. Mostly, the idea of losing in front of my people. They haven’t forgotten about me.

If he’s having a good day and running the right race, nobody can beat Frank Shorter at 10,000 meters, nobody except me.

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

Don’t be afraid to give up the good for the great.

No one will ever win a 5,000-meter by running an easy two miles. Not against me.

I run to see who has the most guts.

Running gives me confidence.

Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, ‘I’ve never seen anyone run like that before.’ It’s more than just a race, it’s a style. It’s doing something better than anyone else. It’s being creative.

Success isn’t how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started.

Art is a private piece of me.

The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

I think the most important is when I was young, I learnt martial arts; that is my special key.

But if you’re talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.