“We don’t want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What’s going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?”

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.

It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline. I have many times felt that this word is the most ill-defined in all of our language.

And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you’ll still be wrong, but you’ll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.

If you have the courage and you have the heart, that hero just might be you.

Life insurance is time. The time a man might not have. If he needs time, he needs life insurance.

I thought anything might happen if I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t eat. I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul.

But Buddy was an upper. He was happy. He loved music, and he was really happy. I don’t know…

Don’t ever turn down pleasure because you were afraid of what other people might say.

I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.

I know that it is impossible to talk about my work. And since it’s impossible for me or anybody else to talk about my work, I feel I might as well talk about it.