I wanted to win the Tour de France. And when I won it once, I wanted to do it again, and again, and again, it just kept going. So there wasn't another competitive environment.

I know what happened to my foundation, from raising no money to raising $500m, serving three million people. Do we want to take that away? I don't think anybody says yes.

For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.

Anything is possible. You can be told that you have a 90-percent chance or a 50-percent chance or a 1-percent chance, but you have to believe, and you have to fight.

But the fact is that I wouldn't have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of illness. What it teaches is this: pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.

[A 2005 response to doping allegations] Unfortunately, the witch hunt continues and tomorrow's article is nothing short of tabloid journalism. The paper even admits in its own article that the science in question here is faulty and that I have no way to defend myself. They state: 'There will therefore be no counter-exam nor regulatory prosecutions, in a strict sense, since defendant's rights cannot be respected.' I will simply restate what I have said many times: I have never taken performance enhancing drugs.

Fear is priceless education.