“Every champion was once a contender that refused to give up.”

You’re a disease. And I’m the cure.

I am not the richest, smartest or most talented person in the world, but I succeed because I keep going and going and going.

Consider the source, Don’t be a fool by listening to a fool.

I think that’s become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family – a statement – and you can afford it, then that’s a noble project.

When I tried to branch out into comedy, I didn’t do very well at it, so I went back to doing what I do naturally well, or what the audience expects from me – action pictures.

Through failure, I found different ways to reverse my problems and get into the mainstream of Hollywood.

I tell people diets don’t work. And I don’t care what they say. I have tried them all.

I’m not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren’t straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works.

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I’ve just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it’s not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

All good actors are unpredictable, and a little crazy in a good way, because they feel more secure playing other people than themselves.

I think kids growing up, if they were picked on and feeling inferior at 12, they’re going to feel that way at 72. You just deal with it better. I’m serious.

If you express yourself too much, you’re considered weak.

Making a movie is the same as an orchestra; it’s moving all the different instruments and the sounds, the kinetic and the auditory and the visual all together. I’m probably the trombone.

All young men want to prove themselves.

Nothing is real if you don’t believe in who you are!

When you’re pushed killing is as easy as breathing.

I was lucky to get good coaches and infrastructure that I needed. To become a champion, it is not just a few months’ practice: it takes years to make a champion.

You can win all the tournaments you want, but the majors are what you’re remembered for. It’s how you’re measured as a champion in our sport. The majors are where it’s at.

There are sometimes easier games and others harder, but the Champions League always requires enormous concentration.

A champion team needs only a small window of opportunity to stage a fightback, something I had learnt over the years.

Champions don’t give up when things get hard; they keep trying.  

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.

Champions never complain, they are too busy getting better.

Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head up high above all the others. Never disgrace the generation of your fathers. They were the bravest champions.