“The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me – my mother’s side of the family have awful legs.”

If it’s putting on a great dance record and rocking out in your apartment, do it. If kissing someone for 10 minutes makes you feel confident, do it.

You feel impacted by not having it. It’s an important part of your daily function and what you can do in a day.

The Pentagon isn’t a place that champions individuality and innovation.

It is our humanity, and all the potential within it that makes us beautiful.

I haven’t had an easy life, but at some point ,you have to take responsibility for yourself and shape who it is that you want to be.

I’ve had journalists asking me, ‘What do we call you – is it handicapped, are you disabled, physically challenged?’

I’m not an advocate for disability issues. Human issues are what interest me.

At some point in every person’s life, you will need an assisted medical device – whether it’s your glasses, your contacts, or as you age and you have a hip replacement or a knee replacement or a pacemaker. The prosthetic generation is all around us.

I had a paper round and every night I would put the dinner on before Mum came home from work. I was capable because I had to be.

When I’m curious about something, I do it full on and take it as far as I go, but when I feel like I’ve really explored it, I’m OK with putting it aside and going on to something else.

An athlete experiences the emotions of pain and elation through triumph and defeat, through teamwork and individuality, as nothing more than a human being…that is the true glory of sport.

Giving up is conceding that things will never get better, and that is just not true.

I hate the words ‘handicapped’ and ‘disabled’. They imply that you are less than whole. I don’t see myself that way at all.

The power of the human will to compete and the drive to excel beyond the body’s normal capabilities is most beautifully demonstrated in the arena of sport.

In athletics, the idea of possibility is presumed. It’s not ‘if;’ it’s ‘how.’

I’m not running around as a continual ray of sunshine. It’s just I don’t believe in wasting time feeling sorry for myself. Get over it.

We used to drink an awful lot of alcohol.

I can’t run. I start getting twinges. If I were filmed running, it would be awful.

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them.

Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I’ll do some great, awful painting about her.

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever.

I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.

Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more–it’s sad, but that’s the truth.