Skating taught me to set a goal and to block out other things and just focus on this one thing.

It's hard work to make a four-minute program look effortless and elegant.

Figure skating is a mixture of art and sport.

When I go out on the ice, I just think about my skating. I forget it is a competition.

Money was never the motivation. It never should be in sports.

I'm the sort of person who needs a big mountain in front of me to climb.

Almost nothing is presented to you on a silver platter. You have to really work for it.

I can't say, 'It doesn't matter if you win or lose.' It's not true. You go in to win.

When I get up, I have a cup of coffee, surf the Internet, then do a half-hour run.

I learned not to depend on other people. I needed support, but it's you who has to go out and deliver.

It's not like I didn't do anything for 10 years and chose a new profession. I've been on the ice a lot. I'm not an outsider.

Man only has eyes to beauty when it costs them the inevitability of losing.

I've got a very nice staff here. People with patience, you know, and good temper, and not too brainy, because if you have people who are brainy, they are bound to be very impatient.

Swimming against the current is not idiotic if the waters are racing toward a waterfall.

As the sky prepares to settle its tired, aching feetinto the night’s velvet slippersI settle, into my armchair, soaking the teabag, of my thoughts, into warm liquidy stars.

Nothing is less like life than our idea of it.

To me I've just really, really found a relaxed, peaceful side of my life and I'm enjoying it.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

If you look at someone like Joe Strummer or John Lennon, when you heard their music you knew that they wrote it and they cared about it.

Axl and I came from completely different backgrounds. Because of that we made an interesting pair trying to figure each other out.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.