Quotes from Diamond Dallas Page

How could I not be the underdog, starting at 35 and a half and going from a manager and a fourth-string color commentator to being a wrestler?

When you become a wrestler at 35 and your career takes off at 40, nobody believes in you. But there are some people out there who watch how I did it, and I did it through intense work ethic.

I told people I was going to be a wrestler, and they fell down laughing.

I used to say Page Joseph Falkinburg - which is my given name - when Page Joseph Falkinburg stopped trying to be this over-the-top professional wrestler, Diamond Dallas Page, and Diamond Dallas Page became Page Joseph Falkinburg, that's when my career took off.

I don't want to spoil this for anybody but wrestling, sports entertainment, is 'pre-determined.'

I don't think I'll ever be out of wrestling, because I was that kid at 8 years old that dreamed of being a world champion.

I started wrestling when I was 35, but my career didn't take off until I was 40.

People don't understand that, when I was at WCW, if I wasn't wrestling that night, I was down at the Power Plant teaching. I was teaching people how to do stuff, but every time you teach someone, you learn more. The more you learn, the more you teach. The more you teach, the better you get.

No one iced their body in professional wrestling before me. I did it because I was 35, 36, 37. I was already what would have been considered an old timer.

My first match with Bill Goldberg, it was for the World Title in 1998. Bill had only been wrestling a year. Well, we stole the show. Because I was going to make Bill look as good as he was, and he was great. He had that incredible charisma, personality, and that 'it' factor. Rousey has that same thing.

Wrestling is the first reality show. With a reality show, you never what is real and what is not.

Wrestling and horror just sort of go together.

From wrestling, I learned what I'm not going to do again.

Wrestling is cyclical. And if you look at the '80s, it had an unbelievable run, and then it just fell down. '90s had the biggest run ever because of the Monday Night Wars.

Through wrestling, my second home was Fort Myers, Florida.

That diamond cutter sign became my moniker.

If you say 'I can't,' you'd better add on 'yet.' Once you start to change that inner dialogue, things that would seem completely impossible become possible.

I live for inspiring people to do things they think they can't. My goal is to completely eliminate the word 'can't' from the equation.

At 31, I decided to learn how to read and, at 32, read my first book: Lee Iacocca's autobiography. Ten years later, with my friend Larry 'Smokey' Genta, I wrote my first book, which was my proudest accomplishment.

When I came into WWE after Monday Night Wars, it wasn't my greatest time in the business... but they kept bringing me back.

The run that I had - which really was, like, four months in the WWE - it wasn't great. But my opening day was great. My opening day was humongous. And then WrestleMania was pretty much my closing card. I did one 'Raw' after that, but that WrestleMania 18 match that I had with Christian, that was a hell of a match.

I let the WWE control my destiny, and it didn't work out so well.

My business wouldn't be doing as strong as it is without the support of WWE.

I can't tell you how many times I hit that mat, especially that first year, where I said to myself, 'Man, this fake stuff hurts like hell. Do I really want to do this?' And every time, I would come back, 'Yeah, I wanna do this.'