“I’m from Dagestan, I’m born in Dagestan, and Dagestan is a different level for people living a tough life, people living in the mountains.”

I came to the UFC to fight with top-level fighters and become the undisputed, undefeated champion. This is my goal.

These guys talk when I’m injured, but when I’m healthy, where are these guys? Tony or Conor, it doesn’t matter. Or maybe they’re going to fight it each other? It doesn’t matter.

I need eight weeks, train hard, last one week make weight, and go to the war. Because when I go to the war, I have to know I am ready or no.

I want to stay humble, but I have to talk because the other guys talk too much, and I understand the crazy power the UFC PR machine has.

I don’t know about politics so much. I’m a professional athlete.

Next fight? If the UFC tell me, ‘What do you want?’ I’m going to say Tony Ferguson.

My best background is, like, smash opponents. I all the time go forward. I all the time try to take down somebody. Make him give up. This is my style, you know. This is what I do all my life.

When I fought with Michael Johnson, when I took his arm for the kimura, I can break it, but I go very slowly, be careful, because I don’t want to give him injury.

I never have a problem with the weight cut. My number one enemy is injuries because I train so hard.

I train, eat, sleep, and repeat.

My style is not like anyone’s. I’m not a typical wrestler.

They’re all fake belts. To be honest, I think real belt is Tony Ferguson’s.

I think about only me.

You have to punch hard for knockouts, and to beat me, you have to knock me out.

Of course I am tough, but I am smart, too. I’m more smart than tough. People watching my record and say that this guy is tough. This is not about tough; this is about mind. You think when you fight. This is about everything.

Where is Conor? He wanna fight with a bus. I want to fight with a real gangster. Iaquinta, thank you so much.

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.

Whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was fifth.

When I was born, I was effectively dead. Weird, I know. The doctors couldn’t get any reaction from me, so I had to be brought round, and although it seemed like I was okay, there were underlying problems.

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page

Where you have come from is why you are going places.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

I just don’t care what people have to say. I keep pushing toward what I want. It’s just how I am. I don’t know where I got it from.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that’s too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.