“I’m a bad guy. But if I was a good guy, nobody would want to pay to see me fight.”

What was most important was the knowledge [aspect] of the fight. I learned this early on and just told myself to “upgrade my mind.” That’s just what I wanted to do my whole life.

There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes, just don’t make the same ones. We don’t want to duplicate them.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.

There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s an illusion of fear. Fear is an illusion. If you gonna die, you gonna die anyway; it’s not something to fear, fear is not gonna help.

At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older, life is totally about losing everything.

Yes, time flies. And where did it leave you? Old too soon, smart too late.

I’m the most brutal and ruthless conquerer there has ever been.

Anyone with a grain of sense would know that if I punched my wife I would rip her head off. It’s all lies. I have never laid a finger on her.

The mind is a real dangerous neighborhood to travel by ourselves.

There’s no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don’t want to close the door on it either.

I’m gonna make sure you talk about me, and your grandkids and kids after that gonna know about me…your great grandkids will say “wow, wasn’t that a bizarre individual?”

We all have to control our feelings. That’s the thing that separates us from animals.

In order to be a friend to anybody, you have to be a friend to yourself. If you’re not a friend to yourself, there’s no way you’re gonna have any friends.

I try my best to learn from other people’s mistakes. I have a lot of respect for people who can change.

It’s good to know how to read, but it’s dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you’re reading.

I don’t try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That’s nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

They’re powerful, those songs. At times they’ve been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home.

Father asked us what was God’s noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

Things are never as bad as they seem.

Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.

Every person I killed I strongly believe that they were bad. When I do go face God there is going to be lots of things I will have to account for but killing any of those people is not one of them.

My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn’t worth discussing.