Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.

It's like people always say, Well, does sport teach you anything in life? It teaches you certain things, but it doesn't teach you other things. It doesn't teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things.

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.