A line I like to use is, "Every day is training. Every day of life is a pursuit of perfection."

It's not about winning or losing a competition, it's about beating the doubt from within yourself and knowing at the end of each day you are one step closer to your goals.

Part of being a good gymnast is being very disciplined - you have to know how to train right, eat right, sleep right.

I'm very disciplined in many aspects of my life, and I think a lot of that has to do with how I was raised and the sport I've been in my whole life.

I eat very clean foods, healthy foods and drink a lot of water.

There is a period of tapering when we're not in the gym quite as long to try to save our bodies, but leading up to the competition we try to keep things similar to the rest of the year.

I'm on my own, luckily doing well, but like I said, we don't make a ridiculous amount of money and I have to be disciplined with what I do with it.

It's tough. Gymnastics isn't basketball or football or baseball, where you can get these huge contracts and make a lot of money.

When I was 22, I finally reached that huge goal. Now I'm going for another one. It's so satisfying. It's something that I worked for for so long, and just to know that I got it feels so great.

Gymnastics is definitely my job, but the great thing about that is I love my job.

I'm able to support my wife and family off of gymnastics. But at the same time I do take it very seriously - it is a job for me.

What we need is the power to pray.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.

I was isolated but not ostracized, ignored but not abused.

If you're Iran's minister of defense, I think you'd try to develop at least one nuclear weapon to save yourself from what happened to Iraq.

I shot him the bird. (Get it? I shot him the—never mind.)

I lived in a town of 400 until I was like nine or ten. My dad coached all the sports - he was a gym teacher and health teacher for grades K-12

One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

I was the chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the chief architects the last time we balanced a budget, and it was the first time we had done it since man walked on the moon.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.