“There is nothing wrong with having competitive instincts. They are survival instincts.”

In order to grow, you must accept new responsibilities, no matter how uncertain you may feel or how unprepared you are to deal with them.

Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity.

I want to keep coaching as long as I can. I love teaching and working with student athletes and I love being at the University of Tennessee.

Hard work breeds self-respect.

Nine-tenths of discipline is having the patience to do things right.

You have to make shots. That’s the bottom line.

Attitude is a choice. Think positive thoughts daily. Believe in yourself.

If you don’t want responsibility, don’t sit in the big chair. To be successful, you must accept full responsibility

The willingness to experiment with change may be the most essential ingredient to success at anything.

We communicate all the time, even when we don’t realize it. Be aware of body language.

Attitude is a choice. What you think you can do, whether positive or negative, confident or scared, will most likely happen.

I don’t give out compliments easily.

Teamwork doesn’t come naturally. It must be taught.

A competitor continually sets new goals. He feels the need to keep raising the bar. If the fist goal is to make the team, and he achieves it, he immediately resets the goal to: I want to be a starter.

I think the only thing that I really thought about, I am always every year thinking about how I can get better, how my stuff can get better, how our team can improve.

I’m interested to see where a combination of faith and science will take me.

It is with roses and locomotives that my poems are competing.

The great fights with your strongest rivals are always the biggest motivation. When you win easily it’s not the same taste.

To win the Championship in the first year will be hard. We need time to become competitive and win races.

In 2009, I didn’t like that Yamaha signed such a young and competitive teammate [Jorge Lorenzo]. But now everything is different. We are more mature. Everyone knows his role and position. Things are clear.

You really are never playing an opponent. You are playing yourself.

In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.

I never thought about competing in the Olympic Games when I was growing up.

I think for me, the most fun competition that I’ve had was my first Worlds.