Player Quotations | Page 8

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Mostly this problem is contained in the fact that the US makes it so difficult for Canadians to get green cards (you heard it here), but if an American orchestra really wants a player, they have their ways.

The best thing you can say about any coach is his players play hard for him.

Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.

I don't mind fans coming up in a friendly, respectful way. That's all part of the fun of being a top tennis player. But if people take pictures without permission, particularly if my children are in the shot, I feel uncomfortable.

I like stubborn players. At least they have an opinion. If they are right or wrong, this doesn't matter for me.

I think Serena Williams is the best tennis player of this generation, if not the best ever. It is amazing for her to be playing as well as she is at the age of 31.

I think each player has an individual style. Each is concerned with giving the best to his team, and I think my best talent is dribbling and setting up goal situations, giving an assist or deceiving one of the other team's players.

There is always the risk of being over-confident when you are preparing to face a weaker player.

I made a better decision in choosing my team. Sure, I had a bigger choice of players to choose from - but I couldn't have asked for a harder working group of players who did an incredible job.

If I could apologise and go back and change history I would do. But the goal is still a goal, Argentina became world champions and I was the best player in the world

Wrestlers are a bunch of wanna-be football players.

The Soviet Union was an exception, but even there chess players were not rich. Only Fischer changed that.

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.

I gave a Collings dreadnought to a young guitar player in the Valley where I live because he didn't have a good acoustic, and he's a terrific player.

I guess I think like deep inside, I know that it's like, it's a different kind of performing, it's not really... You're not performing like a guitar player or a singer is performing, you know what I mean? So it's weird to be in the same type setup as one of those. 'Cause I'm not really doing much, you know, like technically it's not that hard.

You are responsible to each other because when you win a game of football, you only need eight players to perform well.

I think most players would love, at one stage in their career, to say, 'I've been No. 1 in the world.

If I'd still been in one piece from the World Cup and gone through my career, what type of player would I have been? No doubt about it, if I hadn't had as many injuries I would have been the all-time leading scorer for England.

There is still a lot of football in me and I enjoy watching the players go out there and be the best players they can possibly be.

A lot of amateurs are terrified of going up against a player who is clearly better than they are. They never play their best, because they aren't comfortable. There's one surefire way to get over that, and it's to ask yourself, 'What if I beat him?' Imagine the possibility.

In Castling, the King must be moved first, or before the Rook is quitted. If the Rook be quitted before the King is touched, the opposing player may demand that the move of the Rook shall stand without the Castling being completed.

It's flattering to be compared in any way to Tiger Woods, because he's the best player in the world.

Women will not talk about football unless one of them is in love with a football player, and then suddenly you discover that they know everything that is to be known about it.

My background playing soccer gave me a natural advantage over many of the American-born players.

But remember, guitar players are a dime a dozen.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

Man, coaching is a hard job, and it requires a lot of time... I hear stories from coaches who tell me that players call them in the middle of the night not knowing where they parked their car.

The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break.

And I want to do it the right way, like everybody else, not just a famous figurehead that gets a job because he is a famous basketball player. I want to really learn the business.

I enjoyed the position I was in as a tennis player. I was to blame when I lost. I was to blame when I won. And I really like that, because I played soccer a lot too, and I couldn't stand it when I had to blame it on the goalkeeper.

It's funny, 'cause it seems like just yesterday that I was the youngest player just starting out. But now there are young players all over the league, and they'll ask me questions about playing overseas or finding an agent.

People think that there is so much money in tennis, but the reality is unless you're ranked in about the top 50 you don't earn much at all. It is hard to support yourself travelling the world, to be away from home most of the year and to pay for a coach to help you become a better player.

But the problem with coaching is that it is a full-time job. By that I mean for at least 40 weeks in a year you have to be with the player, either travelling or training. Right now I don't want to do that

It's been a great honor for me to be a player for the Detroit Red Wings, to play for an Original Six franchise. I know I'm far from perfect, but I learned a lot.

I can't say I feel influenced by today's guitar players.

Football is made up of all kinds of conflict. In a dressing room, between players, between us and the manager, between us and loads of people who don't seem to matter. It's constant and harsh sometimes.

Listen, everything I have in my life is because of the NHL and because of hockey, and I love the game and I loved every minute of being a player, I loved coaching, I loved being involved in the NHL.

When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.

Look, coaching is about human interaction and trying to know your players. Any coach would tell you that. I'm no different.

I think these awards are always nice for a player but they also reflect well on the club. It shows that Arsenal's performance have been noted all around the world and it helps by having so many good players around me.

As a player, I was fortunate to work with coaching and medical staffs that underscored the importance of utilizing injury prevention exercises, which contributed to my healthy and long playing career.

I was a baseball player and a football player at Stanford, so I didn't play a lot of golf in college. I really started playing a lot after I turned pro and I had some time in the off-season.

I can evaluate a player in a very short period of time because I'm very close to that game, very educated in that game and played the game for a long, long time. I wasn't just a guy with talent. I learned a lot about the game.

As a coach you can influence the diet of your players. You can point out what is wrong.

I have won many awards and I am very happy about this, but I am not the best player in the world.

The biggest ambition in my career is still to win the European Cup. I want to have a picture of that to look at later; I want to have that medal. You can have a contract that is better than your friends, but no player looks back and says: 'I won more money.'

We should because when coaches get fired, the players have a lot to do with it.

I've got to make some decisions just like any other player that has ever played this game, that eventually the clock stops, their basketball clock stops.

If you ask any great player or great quarterback, there's a certain inner confidence that you're as good as anybody. But you can't say who is the absolute best. To be considered is special in itself.

I always felt that I had to leave a legacy on the African continent. As I was only the third player to come to the NBA from Africa, I felt I had to do my best to recruit more young Africans to come and play in the NBA - and also find a way to bring the NBA to Africa.

All I ever wanted to do was play competitive golf against the best players in the world.

The whole kiss-and-tell thing is a negative approach that often happens in a World Cup. We will see negative stories about the players and it can affect their confidence and the overall performance of the national team on the pitch, let alone the bid to actually stage the competition.

Honestly, Flav is not much of a video game player these days. BUT, I used to spend hours on Time Crisis. I beat all levels, man.

The manager is to be blamed who distributes parts to his players which they are unable to act.

I haven't seen a player in this game, as long as I've been in it, that can't be pitched to... Barry is an outstanding ballplayer. I respect him an awful lot. I also have confidence in my pitchers that they can pitch to Barry Bonds and get him out.

Defensive backs are the best players on the field. But when you get an exceptional player like a Deion Sanders or a Darrell Green - these guys are fast and they have very good technique. You have to work a little harder.

My kid was a great baseball player. I thought I had it made. Front-row seats at Yankee Stadium. Then he turned sixteen and wanted to be a rapper.

It's frustrating at times when you think you've earned a chance to play on the field and you're over there sitting on the bench. That's not the kind of player I am. I'm the kind of player who wants to be out there on the field and needs to contribute every minute of every game.

A player is said to have the opposition when he can place his King directly in front of the adverse King, with only one square between them. This is often an important advantage in ending games.

What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this.

The top players talk more now, and we have more meetings. We're just trying to get things better. But we still need somebody who could make a difference.

It's up to the national associations and their leagues to limit the entry of foreign players.

As I said, when we needed to move over to rock'n'roll, Sam and Vernon couldn't quite make the shift. So that's when Larry took over on drums, and we needed a bass player.

I don't follow other players or the tournaments they play. I have my own schedule and do my own thing. I never really think, 'Oh, I want to be or play like so-and-so.' I just like being myself.

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

All the really good players I know, they all knew right from wrong. So many of them don't learn that at home nowadays.

They thought we were going to hurt the game, but we just wanted to help ourselves, because the players needed to get together to protect their interests.

I started in the lowest league in baseball, and I worked my way all the way up to Triple A and then to the big leagues. I never reached the level that I thought I would reach as a player. But that's the way it goes. So then I started from the bottom as a manager, and I worked my way up to managing the Dodgers for 20 years.

I quit my band in New York City in 1969 and I got really angry at them. I got angry at one of my guitar players and I dove over the drum set and we got into a fight.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was very intense. Maybe that's what caught everybody's attention. As a player, he didn't do anything amazing.

I have never believed in comparisons, whether they are about different eras, players or coaches.

It made me hungry. I feel like I'm in a program that really helped me individually as a player. I feel like I'm with a group of guys that are like my best friends.

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I used to be quite a big video game player at university and post-university in that weird moment in life before you have a proper job and you've got a lot of idle time.

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

Culture is very important to the Mavs. Your best player has to be a fit for what you want the culture of the team to be. He has to be someone who leads by example. Someone who sets the tone in the locker room and on the court. It isn't about who talks the most or the loudest. It is about the demeanor and attitude he brings.

I reside in a new colony for the Chinese-singing banjo player, with a population of one. At least I have something I have to do with my life.

I've been asked a lot lately if tennis is clean or not. I don't know any more how you judge whether a sport is clean. If one in 100 players is doping, in my eyes that isn't a clean sport.

I was a professional baseball player from the time I was drafted out of high school in 1981 until the time I retired in 2003.

The only thing I believe is this: A player does not have to like a manager and he does not have to respect a manager. All he has to do is obey the rules.

A quarterback that goes out and performs for you and is a franchise quarterback is more valuable than a player playing another position, but there's a lot more risk there. It's a more difficult position to play, and there are lot more failures.

'Aqualung' marks the point at which I had the confidence as a songwriter and as a guitar player to actually pick up and play the guitar and be at the forefront of the band. It's also the album on which I began to address religious issues in my music, and I think that happened simply because the time was right for it.

You can learn everything that there is to know about the industry or the player from the company that is performing better or worse.

The Premier League is very difficult football and very different to when you play in Europe, but the player has to have experience to adapt, and this is the key point.

I have worked out with the Thunder, Lakers, Knicks, Grizzlies, Spurs, and a few others before the draft. I have worked out primarily against shorter and supposedly faster players in these workouts.

On the PGA Tour, guys finish in the top 10, make a ton of money and think they're great players. In my era, you had to win. We didn't settle for anything else.

All I can do is do my best work, try to create the best kind of moment to moment reality that I can do. That's what I do. I'm an actor. And all the rest of it is like baseball. You hit the ball. Sometimes it goes in the hole. Sometimes it goes to the player.

We are about creating a new wave of talent. We are the Manchester United of kitchens now. Am I playing full-time in the kitchen? I am a player-coach.

The NFL, and I've played a lot of years for them, and they have a lot of restrictions on their players, they have restrictions on their licensees, they have restrictions on everything.

There's only so much you can do until you get on set and see the aesthetics of what you're dealing with. Then you see what the other players are giving to you. It's all about the transfer of energy between different actors.

Winning a ring is everybody's goal, whether you're a player or a coach.

The best players will play. That's the way it will always be.

You hear a few people saying that, you know, maybe some of the past male players like to watch me play or whatever else, just because I play a bit differently and maybe they can relate to it a bit more with a bigger forehand rather than a backhand, good serve and whatnot.

A lot of the moves I make originate from futsal. It's played in a very small space, and the ball control is different in futsal. And to this day my ball control is pretty similar to a futsal player's control.

Many players want to make as much money as they can and change teams for ten grand. How is that going to make much difference to their lives?

I was very lucky that while I was a chess player in a country where chess was not a big deal, I happened to be in the one city where there was a sprouting chess team: Chennai.