“We need a hit, so here I go.”

If I were sitting down with George Steinbrenner (to discuss a salary) and based on what Dave Winfield got for his statistics, I’d have to say, ‘George, you and I are about to become partners.’

It’s great to be young and be a Yankee!

If anyone wants to know why three kids in one family made it to the big leagues they just had to know how we helped each other and how much we practiced back then. We did it every minute we could.

Too many kids today are playing major league ball and don’t belong there.

I’m a ballplayer, not an actor.

There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

Motivation is something nobody else can give you. Others can help motivate you, but basically it must come from you and it must be a constant desire to do your very best at all times and under any circumstances.

All pitchers are born pitchers.

There’s always some youngster coming up- they’ll find somebody.

At my age, I’m just happy to be named the greatest living anything.

There’s nobody taking center from me until I give it up.

Now this is over thirty years later and the guy said he was that cab driver. He apologized and he was serious. I felt awful. He might have been spending his whole life thinking he had jinxed me, but I told him he hadn’t. My number was up.

I thought he had been shot.

Baseball didn’t really get into my blood until I knocked off that hitting streak. Getting a daily hit became more important to me than eating, drinking or sleeping.

At my age, I’m just happy to be named the greatest living anything.

Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you’re going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.

My process for the parodies is that I get an idea for a song and then get approval from the artist and then go in and record it and probably try to get it out as soon as possible.

I need to hear something about how he`s going to bring people together in the spirit, hopefully, of Martin Luther King Jr., and if that`s not heard, then we`ve got to constantly challenge him.

It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I’ve ever done, so it’s a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.

I don’t feel like a person who takes risks. Yet there’s something within me that must provoke controversy because I find it wherever I go.

All I am is what I’m going after.

You take a guy like George Clooney who goes out there to Darfur, and gets things done! That’s magical. He’s done a great thing.

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.