“I never want to discontinue giving kids opportunities.”

Now do I get some time off? Do I get a bonus? Do I get to go on a cruise? But it’s not to keep trying to be the best. That’s not necessarily human nature.

One thing I always tell players is that there are three bad things.

There won’t be any hearsay. There won’t be any expert analysis from anybody else. It will be the real deal.

I think you have to be more flexible to be a pro coach because once you pay the guy the money, whether he can backpedal the way you want him to or whatever, his style of play may not suit you, but you still are going to play him, and he is going to be a part of your team.

The way I look at it is, if you don’t want somebody to know something, don’t say it. If you don’t want them to see you do something, don’t do it.

We all have anxiety about things. We all have little insecurities, but eventually you have to face your fears if you want to be successful, and everybody has some fear of failure.

I don’t believe you name a starter until the starter wins the team.

I don’t think I’m complicated at all. I’m not political, and I’m not trying to be diplomatic. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, and I don’t say bad things about people. There is no agenda. There’s no trying to fool somebody.

I think there’s a certain pride people have in competition.

Honesty and integrity is an important part of our character, my character.

I played so long ago, I don’t think anybody even knew you could transfer. I don’t think they knew anything about it.

If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn’t like me. So, why would I do that?

When I talk about a successful program, define that. It’s not just winning the national championship every year because nobody can do that.

You can blame the other guy for saying it, or you can look at yourself and say, ‘I must have contributed to this.’

I would give them the ball and score points. I wouldn’t play them on defense. I would play them where they can get the ball and score points.

You can control your own destiny a little bit better in college. It’s hard to control all the variables, especially with the salary cap and things like that, in pro football.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

Such is O’Brian’s power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.