There's been this steady metamorphosis from just surviving to being a craftsman and, ultimately, the hope is to be an artist in what you do.?

A lot of people don't trust the pitch. There's this kind of reputation it has for being untrustworthy and fickle and capricious and everything else, and those are words that big league managers and general managers and organizations aren't too fond of.

You never go into a season thinking you're going to strike out 200 guys or that you would have the most double-digit strikeout games in the big leagues, or anything like that. You just try to win, and the outing becomes what the outing becomes.

In an unhealthy way, I found a lot of validity in having always been a very good athlete, a very good baseball player, and I've since grown out of that place into a different perspective and learned how to live differently, thankfully, where baseball is certainly something that's very important to me. It's not who I am, though. It's just what I do.

Who doesn’t want a Cy Young Award? What kid didn’t grow up wanting to be the best? I’m no different. I want to be the best. I’ve always wanted to be the best.

I think what motivated me was just hope. Something inside of me, deep down in my guts, always felt like there was something in there.

When you start a game, you don't think to yourself, "well, OK, I'm going throw a one-hitter today." It just becomes an organism, your outing becomes an organism and it grows.