You need to work very hard, you have to spend a lot of time practicing your sport - six to seven hours daily.

I have bought pole vault equipment, the landing areas, posts, which costs a lot of money. We pay for coaches

First do it, then say it.

I think that, generally, you need to live with your sport 24 hours a day.

I have spoken with many former athletes, and they tell me the best time they had was in sports. I listen to them and use their experience in my career.

The pole vault is a very complicated event, there are many things involved.

People come from around the world and can understand each other without even speaking the same languages!

Even now, I want to keep my amateur spirit, to spend my time, to be in the sport with all my heart.

Often you need to take some risk, but it must be a realistic risk, you can't take a crazy risk.

The Olympics are always a special competition. It is very difficult to predict what will happen.

I decided to create a sports club during the Soviet times. It was my dream.

Don't judge me because I sin differently from you.

Be careful of things like alcohol and drugs.

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age.

Don't let your excuses stand in the way of achieving your dreams

Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.

Root out the violence in your life, and learn to live compassionately and mindfully. Seek peace. When you have peace within, real peace with others is possible.

Casting the right actor for the right part is some unspoken thing between the two of you to communicate.

I haven't done the Star Wars kind of films.

I've never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I've only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

I am indeed a moral realist.