A biography for Dorian Yateshasn’t been written yet.
“It is fortunate that I am quite a secure person and my training flew in the face of what everybody else was doing as they were all just copying what the American bodybuilders did, as reported in the magazines. But it didn't take long before people were listening to me: it happens when you are Mr. Olympia.”
“As an early teen, soccer is the number one thing that you do - and I wasn't very good at that.”
“If you come to my house there are no bodybuilding pictures or anything in my house. I try to keep that separate, just because it is all consuming and I don't want it around me when I'm at home.”
“As long as I'm in good physical shape, that's a passion for me, to be physically fit. That's the main thing now, the look is secondary. But I think I look OK, not too bad for a 55 year old.”
“So initially getting up on stage I was really nervous, I was like, 'wow, I'm going to be standing there and all these people are going to be looking at me?' But funnily enough it wasn't too traumatic. It felt quite natural because I felt I looked good and I knew how to do the poses.”
“What I like is the journey, the year-round struggle to improve.”
“You see guys in amateur contest who are much better conditioned than the professionals. To me the professionals should be better. Just because they are bigger, it doesn't mean they are better.”
“If you undermine people's confidence, they turn up at the contest trying to get second place.”
“I've no wish to run into a contest and make a fool of myself, leaving my career in a cul-de-sac. I want to be a success in the sport of bodybuilding.”
“It's very painful for me to sit back and watch people get sick and die due to preventable lifestyle choices.”
“I kind of stumbled into this. I used to do karate and then I started reading muscle magazines. Eventually, I began training and competing.”
“It's not good to lose your dad at any time but at 13 years of age you are just going through puberty and growing up and that was a very crucial time and was a hard time to lose my dad and it had a big effect on me.”
“Your schedule really gets thrown off when you are traveling. And a schedule is very important when you're training.”
“I started messing around in my teen years but didn't really begin training properly until the age of 21. I did a lot of reading prior to that - Mike Mentzer, Arthur Jones and all other notable bodybuilding authors - and just came up with a routine that worked for me.”
“Lots of people who do bodybuilding want to walk around in tank top and shorts, because they want to show people what they've got - and there's nothing wrong with that. But I didn't want to do that because I didn't care what people thought.”
“I was a pretty fit and physical kid, and my first interest was in martial arts and kung fu with all the Bruce Lee movies.”
“I was always criticized through my whole career because I wasn't doing the whole smiling thing on stage. But I didn't feel like doing that, I felt like I was there for competition and it was tough and I wasn't there to smile.”
“The failure rate for gym owners and personal trainers is very high because it is very difficult for them to work on their business when they are busy working in their business.”
“We're different people. Politics and films were an ambition for Arnold, but never for me. But I would say that his contribution in broad-basing the sport can hardly be matched.”
“In every sport, at the competitive level, there's always a danger of injury. But there are considerably less chances in body building comparatively, than say in soccer.”