I don't care where people come from. It is not important to me. If you are good people will like you, if you're not, they won't. It is simple.

You can take your fitness seriously, but not yourself. That's the most difficult part: not to relax. That's the most difficult challenge I'm facing every fight.

The whole key is to be honest with yourself, find the weak spots, work on it, get it done.

I think that boxing is actually not as dangerous as the politics. In boxing, you're gonna get a bloody nose or a black eye. In politics you can obviously get either dioxin in the food or bullet in the head.

I don't like to get hit, who likes it? I probably wouldn't do this sport if I was getting hit that much.

In Soviet times the border was closed so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.

That's the most terrible mistake you can make: to relax. It's difficult to become a champion, but it's more difficult to maintain it for many years because you're getting too comfortable.