I think the hardest thing in life is to forgive. Hate is self destructive. If you hate somebody, you're not hurting the person you hate, you're hurting yourself. It's a healing, actually, it's a real healing...forgiveness.

I was a rotten kid. My excitement came from seeing what I could get away with.

However dark the night, however dim our hopes, the light will always follow darkness.

People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.

I'd made it this far and refused to give up because all my life I had always finished the race.

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.

The race film had confirmed a dead heat. That was great. But even better, most of the New York press finally learned to spell my name correctly.