“When a guy takes off his coat, he’s not going to fight. When a guy takes off his wristwatch, watch out!”

I just can’t recruit where there’s grass around.

They call me eccentric. They used to call me nuts. I haven’t changed.

I’m not saying that they were Einsteins; they were marginal students. But every ballplayer whoever touched me has moved up his station in life. And the players moved up my station.

Dean Meminger was quicker than 11:15 Mass at a seaside resort.

It’s a profession in which, the longer you stay, the closer you are to being fired.

Butch, you come from DeWitt Clinton. There are five thousand brothers in that school.

A box score does not properly represent the most important thing – team play. It shows some guy scoring 27 points, but it doesn’t show that my 27-point man let his guy score 30.

A team should be an extension of a coach’s personality. My teams are arrogant and obnoxious.

Most people zero in on their failures. I try to keep all my attention on a pyramid type philosophy rather than the averaging-down philosophy.

I don’t know why people question the academic training of an athlete.

You’re the best there. You’ve been all-city two years in a row. How bad can you be? You come with me and we’ll make nice music.

My rule was I wouldn’t recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house.

Live every day as if it were Saturday night.

I’m an Einstein of the streets and an Oxford scholar of common sense.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.

If the first button of one’s coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.

I was raised in California, so this whole New York winter thing is completely new for me. I’ve already justified buying seven coats!

Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.

He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.

I see them in my audience all the time, with the fur coat, a woman whose hand is always out front, or the two fingers are on the cheek to show her diamond. I don’t have anything against that.

Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.