Every sport has helped me excel in another. Boxing has given me the mental strength to know that I can face anything on the field, without a doubt.

Boxing is a space in which our repressed feelings, our fears and our identity anxieties all converge. Boxing resolves everything in the sense of death. It manages to do so because it is a primal display; a manifestation of an unrepeatable existential experience, a ‘true’ reality; the revelation of an internal world in which not only the body (with all its suffering) and the flesh are on the line, but also the intellect, the spirit and so-called ‘culture.’ It is a cruel spectacle made of pain and love, of the unpredictable and the serious, of boredom and great emotions.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

I think of boxing a lot with standup. I even train with boxing trainers

Getting hit motivates me. It makes me punish the guy more. A fighter takes a punch, hits back with three punches.

I always think that in a boxing match you should always put a normal person in there, to throw in some punches. You need something to just compare how good people really are at what they do!

Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world.

Boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.

Boxing is my life, but my life is not only boxing.

Imagine you’re a boxer, and on your first day in the ring you take one on your chin. It’s gonna hurt like fucking hell, but at year ten of being a boxer, you won’t be stopped by one punch. You’ll be able to absorb twelve rounds of getting beat the fuck down and come back the very next day and fight again. It’s not that the punch has lost power. Your opponents will be even stronger. The change has happened within your brain. You’ve calloused your mind. Over a period of time, your tolerance for mental and physical suffering will have expanded because your software will have learned that you can take a hell of a lot more than one punch, and if you stay with any task that is trying to beat you down, you will reap rewards.

When I was young, I was very energetic and strong – just too hyperactive. So when I went to the boxing club, everything seemed normal to me. I enjoyed it, I liked punching things, hitting the boxing bag, fighting people in the boxing ring and in school I was naughty as well; but when I started boxing, I totally changed everything – you know, my whole life changed, I was good, I didn’t misbehave, I was always behaving in school. The teacher was happy with my behaviour.

Politics is like boxing — you try to knock out your opponents.

Anything can happen in the sport of boxing.

I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one's body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.