Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made.

It never gets easier; you just go faster.

It doesn't get any easier; you just get faster.

There is no pill, no drug, that can do for you what one hour of exercise can.

I have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle, it's not going to be satisfying.

If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sports. If he isn't, it would be the greatest fraud.

Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.

You don't suffer, kill yourself and take the risks I take just for money. I love bike racing.

There are few things that you can't do as long as you are willing to apply yourself.

I'm lucky that mountian biking wasn't around when I was 20, because I wouldn't have won the Tour de France. It's my kind of sport - hard, individualistic, and not a lot of tactics.

The key is being able to endure psychologically. When you're not riding well, you think, why suffer? Why push yourself for four or five hours? The mountains are the pinnacle of suffering

And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.

Like a brilliant shooting star, she had almost reached her zenith when her light was extinguished.

Romantic Orientalism was fascinated by the color and excitement of a powerful culture, and nearly always approached its subject with love.

My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought.

Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.

You know I used to work at Ikea, selling over 7,000 products. Give me a number between 1-7,000 I'll tell you about it. Sorry out of stock, lucky you chose that one.

If you look at America now as a giant ship, before we can turn it around and go the other way, we've got to stop. This has been our problem all along. We haven't really advanced anything we believe.

I went to a Karaoke Bar last night that didn't play any 70s music, at first I was afriad, oh I was petrified

And you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.