“I get people to this day – I won my title 25 years ago – saying how wonderful a time they had during that dark period in our history when they came to watch me fight.”

I’ve spent my life navigating through sensitive issues. Not wanting to upset people.

I don’t want to sound obnoxious, but I like to think I brought it another step. I was able to bring people who were casually interested in boxing together.

Boxing is changing and training methods are slowly being dragged into the 21st century.

Work hard, think fast and you’ll last.

What I would say about Barney Eastwood is that when our relationship worked, it worked extremely well. He had a lot of strengths as a promoter and a manager.

A pit bull is like a fighter. Every so often it needs to taste blood.

I’d had 35 professional fights and mentally I was tired of it. I’d sort ot fallen out of love with the sport.

Every fighter has a story that could break your heart. We lose, we get hurt and everything comes apart. That’s when it’s so difficult to stay on the straight and narrow.

The trouble with boxing is that too often it ends in sadness.

If somebody had told me in the 1980s that Gerry Adams would shake hands with Ian Paisley or Peter Robinson I would have said put that man in a white suit and lock him up in a padded cell.

I wanted to bring people together, and most importantly not feel threatened when they came to watch me box.

I train very hard, either rowing on the cross trainer or running. Not only do you feel tired afterwards but it relaxes you, it completely clears the head. But to sort things out I also like to walk.

There is nothing like wealth for dulling desire.

Death to a good man is but passing through a dark entry, out of one little dusky room of his Father’s house into another that is fair and large, lightsome and glorious, and divinely entertaining.

The Holy Scripture is like a diamond: in the dark it is like a piece of glass, but as soon as the light strikes it the water begins to sparkle, and the scintillation of life greets us.

Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open and let in the light and you kill it.

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.

We are content in the ‘given’ in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.

Light can penetrate any amount of darkness but no amount of darkness can penetrate light.

Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.

Dark and sour humours, especially those which have a spice of malevolence in them, are vastly disagreeable. Such men have no music in their souls.