“I’m OK being the veteran, but I’m still just a kid.”

I hadn’t focused on mechanics since I signed professionally.

I can relate to anyone. I can hang out with stoners, skaters, surfers, stockbrokers, lawyers, athletes, rappers. I feel I can hang out with any group of people and find common ground to talk with them.

I can count my friends on one hand.

I’m so secure in myself I couldn’t care less what people think of me.

The outfield is solid, so is the catching and the infield.

I was this 5-7 pudgy kid in high school… I wasn’t a popular kid. I was an outcast.

Some people pray to a totem pole, some people pray to a sun, some people pray to a god. It all works for them. It all comes back to what you think.

I do look forward to keeping in touch with the guys because we’ll always be connected in people’s minds.

I just write mechanical things.

When someone becomes successful or rich and famous, people perceive that person as being different. But I’m the same guy I’ve always been.

There’s a part of me that wants to go streak and run outside and jump around and go swim in the ocean and do everything. The other part of me wants to bear down and repeat this kind of performance next year and in the years to come.

I think in the bullpen you can tell during your warmups, if you have a good feel for it. But anything can happen once you get into a game. Sometimes you just wind up throwing it better than ever before one day without knowing why.

The only person who ever stops me from achieving something is me.

I refuse to be molded into some stereotypical ballplayer that has no interests, really, no life, no depth, no intelligence.

We’re all physical bodies, but basically everything we do is determined by what goes on in our heads.

I view my pitching on how confident I was out there, period. And if I lose that confidence, I can become a prisoner of my own mind.

I spar with 18-year-old kids that try to kick my ass all the time. As far as going in and doing a wrestling match, I think that pales in comparison, but it’s a totally different thing. It’s completely different. You have to condition your body.

All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average.

So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that’s part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better.

When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth.

Take this rifle, kid. Gimme that guitar.

I can take $15,000 a year and raise kids on that. Later, they’ll figure out I’ve got millions, but hopefully they’ll have the values to say, ‘So what?

We know smoking tobacco is not good for kids, but a lot of other things aren’t good. Drinking’s not good. Some would say milk’s not good.