After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."

There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.