Quotes About Priorities

My health is 100% more important than coming back to wrestling. Being a good father is more important than going out there and expounding on my belief that doing more hammerlocks in wrestling is good for the business!

I love wrestling, and I love the entertainment aspect of wrestling, but the rest of my life, I just want to be able to live and enjoy my life. I don't want to be living it essentially for other people's entertainment.

As you write about your life, there's a lot of things that you think about that you regret. It's interesting, because one of the things I regret the most is spending so much time focused on wrestling as opposed to focusing on my family.

College, for me, was more about wrestling than actually going to classes.

I'd rather play a double-header than speak at a banquet, and if I went to Wrigley Field knowing I had to be somewhere two hours after the game, it would bother me all day.

I'd rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.

I have no ambitions at all! I have none... seriously. I want to be a good father. I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good son, a good brother, a good family member. I don't have any ambition to direct a film or write a play. I like acting.

With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.'

Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings.

For me, the day job comes first. That's why I call myself a diplomat who writes, not a writer who masquerades as a diplomat. If the day job demands it, I won't write at all. I write in what I call 'the crevices of my day job', and that comes only on weekends.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there's such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can't imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don't believe there is room for all of it. I really don't.

When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.

I didn't think friendship required this much, snapped Elphaba to Boq, I was better off before.

In the chaos of everyday life, it's easy to lose sight of what really matters, and I can use my habits to make sure that my life reflects my values.

Sleep is the new sex.

I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time--but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was productive. Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted.

Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. According to a footnote, the argument of the growing heap is: If ten coins are not enough to make a man rich, what if you add one coin? What if you add another? Finally, you will have to say that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him so.

We all must pay, but we can choose that for which we pay.

When money or health is a problem, you think of little else; when it's not a problem, you don't think much about it. Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness.

When life was taking its ordinary course, it was hard to remember what really mattered.

I should monitor whatever is essential to me. In that way, I ensure that my life reflects my values.

I've been haunted for years by a public service poster I saw just one time, in the subway. It was a photo of a Chinese food take-out container sitting on top of two videos. The caption read, "If this is how you spend your time, why are you living in New York?

Clarity of values also makes it possible to identify red-herring habits. A red-herring habit is a habit that we loudly claim to want to adopt, when we don't actually intend to do so.