Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you . . ." It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.

I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.

People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."