“I believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody’s life.”

All my life, I’ve been trying to make a hole-in-one. The closest I’ve come is a bogey.

You aren’t going to find anybody that’s going to be successful without making a sacrifice and without perseverance.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

To win a national championship, you’ve got to be a little lucky.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

I do think coaches need to get away from the game more, though. It’s good for them.

My wife doesn’t even want to spend 2 hours with me.

The University of Notre Dame does not redshirt, and I endorse that policy completely.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

You don’t go to Notre Dame to learn something; you go to Notre Dame to be somebody.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

On this team, we’re all united in a common goal: to keep my job.

Christmas Day was special because everybody is watching at home. That’s what I loved about Christmas Day because it shined the spotlight on the Lakers, on our team.

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

The attitude that I’m going to show everybody, I’m going to work hard to get better and better.

The looks, the stares, the giggles . . . I wanted to show everybody that I could do better and also that I could read.

And I want to do it the right way, like everybody else, not just a famous figurehead that gets a job because he is a famous basketball player. I want to really learn the business.

Everybody’s talking trash these days, so why not keep quiet?

Guys like Larry Bird — he played so hard, he wants everybody else to play hard. That’s not unreasonable. Any coach would want that and demand that.

A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear-and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed-stupid and mean.