Quotes on Alex

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

I remember the first time I saw him. He was 13 and just floated over the ground like a cockier spaniel chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind.

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.

David Beckham is Britain's finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practises with a relentless application that the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn't contemplate.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Football. Bloody hell.

The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

It was inevitable, of course, but somehow it didn't seem right to Alex that they would never remember the sound of Carly's laughter, or know how deeply she'd once loved them.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

For me Sir Alex was my father in football. He was crucial in my career and, outside football, was a great human being with me. Talent isn't everything. You can have it from the cradle, but it is necessary to learn the trade to be the best.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment, my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their f*****g perch. And you can print that.