Bobby Knight

My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'

Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.

People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies.

When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.

Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.

I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.

A coach should never be afraid to ask questions of anyone he could learn from.

As coaches we talk about two things: offense and defense. There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense.

A quick way for any player to make himself better is to think about what he himself doesn't like to play against

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

The goal is to make practice more difficult, physically/mentally, than anything your players will face during a game.

I'm not sure I've ever been around anybody that wanted to win more or worked harder than Michael Jordan.

The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.

I don't believe in luck, I believe in preparation.

There are times when my passion for basketball led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better. I've always been too confrontational, especially when I know I'm right.

Offense is not equal opportunity

All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What I did was bring that kid in at 5:00 in the morning, and he would run the stairs from the bottom to the top until I told him to quit.

Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts, but it was made for Indiana.

There are two real keys to winning. You've got to have good players: no coach won with bad players. You win with good players. That is number one. Number two is, when we are playing, let's say we are playing Michigan, and they had a really good press: we've got to solve that press.

The key is not the will to win... everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.

I hate casual shooting. Every shot is preceded by working to get open and catch and shoot under game like conditions