David Haye Quotes

Ring rust is real. I've experienced it myself.

In boxing, if you think you will lose... you're already halfway there.

Whenever I'm onstage, I try my best not to think that I'm performing. It's simply another part of my day.

The adrenaline is pumping before or during a game - you're excited, you're anxious. But the biggest things are just having fun and being confident. There really is no alternative because you just can't be negative. And a huge part of developing that confidence is by working hard every day, and I don't think that is limited to the baseball field. I think that bleeds over to all aspects of anything that you're doing or working on in life.

You get a script and you love it. You find a director that you trust, and it becomes all about how do I commit to this as fully as possible? And the last thing you can afford to have in your mind is what are other people going to think of this?

If I had stood at the free-throw line and thought about 10 million people watching me on the other side of the camera lens, I couldn't have made anything. So I mentally tried to put myself in a familiar place. I thought about all those times I shot free throws in practice and went through the same motion, the same technique that I had used thousands of times. You forget about the outcome. You know you are doing the right things. So you relax and perform.

In truth I never really liked any of the heavy drugs, because normally my energy is up when I'm performing, and that's about it. Cocaine is nothing new. It's the pressure, I think. People use it to relieve that, and for me it is about getting numb and forgetting. I have a reverse metabolic reaction to the stuff.

Frankly, I get much more sensitive about what's written about me than how I look in a photo. I'm so used to people seeing my image in plays and films that what they think about how I look is none of my business. If they says, "Hey, he doesn't look good," I'm like, Whatever, because I know I look different from day to day. But if you're up there putting your heart into something and people reject your performance, that's very painful. The written word can kick your ass.

Singing other people's material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two.

I think playing any iconic role when you're stepping into big shoes, into the shadow of people who have come before you and you can't process that.

I think people who work in comedy and humor are hesitant to analyze it too much, because you feel like if you take it apart, you'll break it and not be able to put it back together again.

I think the social faux par is probably what most people fear... more people fear public speaking than death and that's because we don't want to make a fool of ourselves. It's fundamental.

Staying interested in a match is a lot harder than many people think. Throughout my career, I've always had trouble in the early rounds of a tournament mainly because it was hard for me to psychologically get up until I got to the quarters or the semis. What happened a lot of times is that I would fall behind early, maybe even lose the first couple of sets in a five-set match and then begin to concentrate. Still it wasn't something I could control from the start.

There is always times where you feel discouraged and things coming against you, but I don't know if I ever wanted to throw in the towel. I think one of the most difficult things is every Sunday I am up there ministering, and so you have to have a fresh word, you have to be practical, you need to keep people's attention and so that comes around every seven days.

In filming you're waiting. You're waiting for lights. You're waiting for people set things up. And when you're not waiting, you're repeating. And neither is conducive to spontaneity, you know. Comedy makes you very, very neurotic because you think, I - but did I nail it?

I think I'm getting there, but it's very hard to perform at my absolute peak when an awful lot of people come just to make their presence known, when the lights go down and all you can hear is people screaming.

If I'm engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.

I spent the nights before the Jets' two biggest games last year - for the AFL championship and the Super Bowl - with girls. But I don't consider that bad or foolish of me... The night before a game, I prepare myself both mentally and physically for the next day. I think a ballplayer has to be relaxed to play well; and if that involves being with a girl that night, he should do it.

I think it's important to keep the audience interested. But the best advice that I've gotten is to live in the moment. Sometimes you can get too into your head when you're in a scene.

I get a bit nervous because I just want the show to go well. I think you always have to be a little bit nervous, or else you're a little checked-out, and that's maybe the time when you're not doing your best stuff, because you're kind of just checked-out and falling back on stuff.

I think people who aren't in film experience that when they hear their voice on an answering machine or something.

I'm definitely not a guy that comes in the dressing room saying, "Hey, everybody, what a wonderful life." I'm usually brooding about something I think is wrong. I care so much about getting the music right, and if I think someone's slacking I get very upset about that. I just can't go on stage and say, "Another day, another dollar," which I've heard a few people say: I can't go along with that at all. It's got to be as good as you can do - to my own detriment.

I am still been pumped to train and get myself ready for the biggest events.

I think everyone's afraid of public speaking. There have been times where I've come out of my own show and been like, 'Oh, God, what am I doing?' . . . You have to remind yourself that 'OK, I'm kind of a badass. I can handle it.'

Most people show up for work being physically accoutered but mentally disheveled.