The crazy thing is that I really wasn't under any pressure. My contract wasn't going to expire until the end of 2008, and everyone was satisfied with me. But I wasn't. I always wanted to improve.

Of course they were saying: No doping! But as a rider, it's difficult to believe that things can really change from one day to the next.

The message I understood was this: Just don't get caught!

The patient in the bed next to me told me that the newspapers were reporting on the test, and it was on television all day long.

My mother had to justify the fact that she had heart pills.

The truth is that things were already going so poorly for me that nothing surprised me anymore. But then the BKA sent 20 agents to search my house.

I made a big mistake. There's no doubt about it. But there have been positive testing cases in the past where the offender wasn't attacked to quite the same extent, especially not by other riders.

I wasn't in a position to defend myself. Sometimes it's a brutal profession. The first thing I thought of at the time was revenge. I have a more levelheaded take on the issue today.

Riders called me up afterwards to say that they had had no other choice. I couldn't understand the way they changed their tune.

I wouldn't call it an addiction. But the truth is, when you join a team as a new professional you encounter a system. As a young rider, older riders let you know how the business works.

I can count off on one hand the number of times I've used testosterone gel - because it doesn't really do much.

Desire is half of life

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.

I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.

Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness.

Financial experts are saying we are entering a new chapter in the American economy. I believe it's Chapter 11.

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

The anxiety around such work [vulnerably written ethnographies] is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable.