“I tell you what really fries my ass. When somebody gets on me for the way I look. Fat. Overweight. Well, I may be overweight. But I’m sure not fat.”

The thing that bothers me the most about the media is simple accuracy.

Perform drills that force your players to think

Good basketball always starts with good defense!

My overall point is that ‘one and dones’ are not healthy for college basketball. I should not have made it personal to Kentucky and its players and I apologize.

Offense is not equal opportunity

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven’t called walking for 20 years, now you don’t know what it is. When you call walking, you’re about half right.

If you’re not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

Practice structure determines success.

The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

We should not have to push you to work hard, you should work hard because you want to be a great player.

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was ‘It will be O.K.’ I would wonder, ‘How the hell is it going to be O.K.?’ The worst word in the English language is ‘hope.’

I’ve never felt my job was to win basketball games – rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.

I’m not sure sports writing is an art.

Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.

As I’ve said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators – not recently – fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

The more important reason is that the research itself provides an important long-run perspective on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis.

Running for money doesn’t make you run fast. It makes you run first.

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

I hate shopping. I don’t go shopping. If I do, I run in and out.

When I finished my term, I thought about running for governor then but decided not to because, frankly, I didn’t think I was ready. I wasn’t comfortable that I was prepared to do the job.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

Don’t get cocky just because you’ve had a good run. You can lose your business as fast as you’ve earned it.