Roddy Piper

“I'd never seen a professional wrestling match. First one I saw, I was in. It was just an accident.”

“There was a lot of work that people don't know about that I did to establish my villain persona. There were a lot of miles on the road that went into it, thousands upon thousands of hours of writing on yellow pads while driving in my car with the dome light on.”

“Kurt Angle and Matt Hardy... I have so much respect for them.”

“I was 15 years old when I started wrestling full time, and I know what I had to go through to get here.”

“We got an old saying: I would rather you punch my teeth down my throat than throw a popcorn punch!”

“For years and hundreds of thousands of miles, I drove with one knee, with the eight-track and the light dome on in the car, and a yellow pad, just writing down random ideas. I had notebooks and notebooks. The next morning, I'd go, 'Whoa, what was I thinking?' But there'd be one or two ideas that weren't that bad.”

“Wrestling has a tremendous entrance plan. You come in, and it's, 'Boy, here you are. It's rock and roll; it's wonderful.' It's got no exit plan.”

“I'm not as sharp as I used to be.”

“I put my heart into my career, and the people knew that I did that; and I went from being the most hated man to one of the best loved.”

“Ask me for my shirt off my back, I'll give it to you. Tell me? Not a chance.”

“They say that wrestlers are actors, and they couldn't be more wrong. The truth is wrestling and acting could not be more opposite. Wrestling is explosion, and acting is implosion.”

“If you are the heel, and if you are doing your job right, you are most hated.”

“It seems like I have been fighting someone, something, someplace, in some manner, my whole life.”

“Wrestling moves are made for arenas, not the screen.”

“I owe everything to my fans. They were the ones who cheered for me, and they were the ones who gave me the means to provide for my kids.”

“A lot of guys that were trailblazers, if we were to go back to the actual time, were just really scared and had no choice, but the water's rushing in, and you either swim or sink.”

“I like choir music. I sincerely do!”

“I've got a lot on my shoulders, but I've got the most beautiful family in the world.”

“When I would go into Madison Square Garden, I wasn't the most popular guy. Madison Square Garden, there's 16,000 Puerto Ricans with knives and great radios and stuff.”

“Many hotels, I just sat there and - I call it the silent scream - I don't know why, you just sit there, and tears will just come down, and you'll just sit there for hours, man. There's no place to turn, and when you do turn, who cares? You're just a dumb professional wrestler.”