Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.
We fell in love with wrestling, and then we really wanted to break barriers, and we now get to do that because that's evolved beyond the ring.
If you go to an ATM for a hundred dollars and it keeps spitting twenties, when would you walk away? When it wasn't spitting twenties no more. As long as you can take the money out, you'd stay there. That's what the wrestling business is like.
It is due to wrestling that people now know and recognise me.
If I didn't have the wrestling name that I have, I wouldn't have gotten the financial contract that I got with Strikeforce or the long-term contract or the television contract. That's all because of wrestling.
I love tag team wrestling. I've loved it my whole life.
McGregor is a businessman through and through. He's obviously a wrestling fan.
I was an 8-year-old who loved wrestling and watched it religiously every Saturday at one o'clock.
When I graduated from high school, I weighed 125 pounds because of wrestling. Suddenly, I realized I could eat whatever I wanted - plus, creatine was new at the time. I went from 125 to 175 pounds, working out like crazy. I was yoked. But I wasn't drinking enough fluids and ended up with a kidney stone - and 3 weeks of pure hell.
Tonya Verbeek is a rival of mine I always come up against in the semis or the final of the Olympics. We have been fighting each other for a long time, so she knew my wrestling, and I knew hers... I was thinking that the only thing I could do was somehow to deceive her, anticipate her and get in my tackles.
Pro wrestling is not fake; it's sports entertainment. We go out there and we perform, and a lot of what we do out there is real, but we're not going to insult anyone's intelligence - there is a predetermined winner. It's just the fans don't know who it is, and that's what makes it so intriguing.
I can't imagine, I can't get in the mind of a wrestling fan who wants to break news that spoils a surprise for somebody. Would you want a surprise spoiled?
I was getting a lot of good work with my wrestling up in Iowa, but I needed a more all-around game, striking, jiu-jitsu at a high level. I had a lot of good coaches out at ATT to work with. They pushed me. Everything was smarter. Everything was precise.
When I was in high school, I started getting into Japanese wrestling. For me to watch those matches, I had to order VHS tapes through catalogues, and these tapes were, like, $20 each.
Sometimes - and I don't mean it disrespectfully - the easiest people to work in the wrestling business are the people in the locker room.
Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
I'm not addicted to wrestling anymore. For a long time, I was.
A lot of people are successful in this business because of a catchphrase or athletic ability or charisma or wrestling; Ric Flair is the personification of all of those things, much like his daughter Charlotte, as she is already a multiple-time champion after only a few years in the WWE.
I'm wrestling almost every single day of the week. I'm fighting for so much more. I'm trying to capture a life here, a future. I'm trying to put my kid in college. There are so many things I'm doing. I'm representing the biggest wrestling family on earth.
When I was three, my parents were told that I would never be able to recover from rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors from the biggest and the best of hospitals had said that the condition would never be cured. But with naturopathy and yoga, I recovered and became a wrestler, and even got the opportunity to represent my country in wrestling.
I am a huge wrestling fan. I would say The Rock is my favorite person to watch for obvious reasons.
We had four guys in the family, so somebody was always hitting somebody or chasing somebody or getting mad or fighting or wrestling - that was just what you did. So when you're the youngest, it's good for you. You figure out real early how to get out of headlocks and holds.
Growing up in wrestling, I would see my uncle put on his mask before he walked into auditoriums. The kids would run up to him and ask for autographs and pictures, and seeing him lacing up his boots in the locker room and putting on his mask before heading to the ring, that was all so real to me. That was the modern day superhero to me.
Wrestling in Japan, obviously, the fans are a little bit different - very quiet, very respectful in New Japan - but here in the WWE, these fans are going nuts.
In wrestling, there's a shelf life, and some wrestlers don't pay attention to the shelf life.
Wrestling is second nature: I've been doing it for so long, so if it looks like someone's leg is available, it made sense for my first three fights that I would shoot for legs.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
Cornish wrestling was very different from that in Devon - it was less brutal, as no kicking was allowed.
My whole 'WWE' career has been rebuilding myself and finding the confidence that I once had. It's been one hell of a journey. There have been times I felt like the prodigal son because I left wrestling and abandoned this thing that I loved.
I've done bingo halls and tents in front of 10 people with a cow mooing in the background. Doing that and then going to WrestleMania and the Superdome and wrestling in front of 80,000 people is night and day.
I fell in love with this idea of an old school game character, like Donkey Kong, who looks like a very simple guy but is really wrestling with this very profound struggle: 'What's the meaning of life? What if I don't like this job I've been programmed to do?'
I'm not here if Bill Hunter never forced my hand in wrestling. It was a pivotal point in my life.
I'm not going to be a guy that retires and keeps coming back. When I'm gone, I'm gone. Same thing as amateur wrestling; when I won the world championships in Olympics, I left and I never went back. Same for pro.
I really, really, really love my job, so it's not like I'm trying to quit wrestling to do movies. They just all seemed like cool things to do. I mean, I'd love to be the bad guy in an action movie because then people would get to see another side of me they don't get to see.