Yeah, I'm scared. I'm scared I might kill Schmeling.

There is no such thing as a natural boxer. A natural dancer has to practice hard. A natural painter has to paint all the time. Even a natural fool has to work at it.

A champion doesn't become a champion in the ring, he's merely recognized in the ring. His “becoming” happens during his daily routine.

I can show you how to box. I can teach you every technique and trick I know, but I can never make you a fighter. That comes from inside, and it's something no one else can ever give you.

You have to be tough and stick it out, or you wind up being nothing.

Every man got a right to his own mistakes. Ain't no man that ain't made any.

Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain't going to fix them.

You need a lot of different types of people to make the world better.

I hope they're still making women like my momma. She always told me to do the right thing. She always told me to have pride in myself; she said a good name is better than money.

The one-time cotton picker was now the heavyweight champion of the world.

It hurt to even bump into him.

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

Movies are dreams! And they work on you subliminally.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

I'm not a great beauty. That's not me.

Maybe with "Californication" the character was partly based on Rick Moody. I read him and Jay McInerney, the templates for this bad boy novelist.

When I'm depressed and I feel low thinking that good movies are not made any more, then I put on his movies and I watch them. I laugh and I cry and I have great pleasure.

If I'm happy, I look happy; if I'm angry, I show it. Without worrying about how others may react.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

The twentieth century must be a century of the Blessed Sacrament if it means to be a century of resurrection and of life

Without execution, thinking is mere idleness.