I've lifted weights ever since I was a teenager, but I started going more towards the Olympic weightlifting style, which is clean and jerk.
I'm not somebody who is genetically gifted when it comes to facial hair.
I'm having a really hard time with this retirement thing and not having wrestling.
The blessings wrestling has given me have allowed me to find some new passions, but it's really hard when you've got that first love, and nothing really replaces it.
With ladder matches, you can't expect anything other than craziness.
I've never really been a character on TV. I think, if possible, you want to portray yourself. If you're in a situation where you're supposed to react, you need to react.
People who like hard-hitting wrestling and action, they'll like me.
I've been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I'd already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you've been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.
I like having a bunch of different experiences. I don't want to do just one thing for the rest of my life.
Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao was one of the worst boxing matches I've ever seen, but millions of people watched it because of the personalities involved.
I used to be vegan. I'm not anymore, but I don't eat hardly any meat. But it's nice for me to go to a place like Chipotle where I can get some fresh veggies, some brown rice, some black beans, and all that kind of stuff.
My diet is very kale-heavy. It's so nutrient-dense. I stay away from fake processed stuff.
Being a bad guy is fun for me.
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!
For some reason, the fans got behind me, and I don't know exactly why that is. I wasn't supposed to main event WrestleMania XXX, but the fans were so vocal about it that the fans had no choice but to put me in the match. I've had a lot of lucky breaks.
I wasn't a great athlete.
When I first got to WWE, the head of talent relations was John Laurinaitis, who is now my father-in-law, and the first thing I thought when I saw everything that he had to do is, I thought, 'I would never, in a million years, ever want that job. You could not pay me enough money to have that job.'
A lot of people don't understand how hard the girls on 'Total Divas' work. They're on the road, the same as the rest of us, and then when they get home, they've got to be filming this whole time.
I keep trying to convince people that I'm OK to wrestle, and I think that's probably the hard part. A lot of times I'm trying to convince myself, too, that I can wrestle. It's really hard, because the concussion issue is very subjective, and that's the part that a lot of people don't understand.
I went from being a guy who was sparingly being used on television to being the World Heavyweight Champion and the focus of a lot of the storylines on Smackdown.
One of the wonderful things about wrestling, to me, is that you can protect people who have had head injuries.
I like Everton. If I'm going to cheer for that kind of football team, I'm going to cheer for Everton. But the Seahawks are my passion.
I will say this about the Miz: Even though I don't like his wrestling style, he is a very hard worker. I have a huge amount of respect for him, and I want him to do well.
My No. 1 dream match is Brock Lesnar. And I want that to be a WrestleMania match. I don't know if the WWE will ever let that happen, because they might be afraid he might legitimately hurt me pretty bad.
My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?
With wrestling, you can't describe how that connection with an audience happens. I can't teach anybody how that happens. The bad things that have happened to me in WWE have made that connection stronger.
One of the autobiographies I really liked was Bob Dylan's. It was interesting because he didn't do it in a linear fashion.
To me, the funnest part of wrestling is evolving. If you stay the same all the time, you're eventually going to be left behind.
Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it's about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.
I would read a lot about how to be a dad. I had never changed a diaper before we had Birdie.
With my history of concussions, the WWE wants to protect me, so I've had to take a lot of neurological testing.
Sometimes, things just fall into your lap, and that's pretty incredible.
I have no problem with people eating meat. I would just like it, for the people who do eat meat, for the animals to be treated better. To be treated humanely. Cows in pastures living the life that they're supposed to live. I have no problem with that.
I don't want to be away from wrestling even a little.
My wife and I are very blessed. I am very grateful for the life that we lead.
My biggest concern with the whole deal with 'Total Divas' and with WWE - and, you know, they want you to be engaged with social media and all this kind of stuff - I don't want to live my life to entertain other people.
Part of me wants to stay involved in wrestling, because I love it. But the thing I loved most about it was the wrestling part of it. I didn't get into it to be famous or to be a TV star: I got into it because I loved the act of wrestling.
I always try to live in the moment.
I've always thought Shawn Michaels's story is fascinating.
If it weren't for the Internet, WWE probably wouldn't even know my name. If I had to rely on 'Pro Wrestling Illustrated' to get my name out there, it would have been a much more difficult road.
People have said to me, 'It must be nice to prove so many people wrong,' but I've never really cared about proving anything to anybody else.
I get this anxiety in cities and places like that. When you grow up in kind of a small town and when you grow up around a lot of green and trees and nature and that sort of thing, sometimes I think it's a little mentally disconcerting to be around this concrete.
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.
I think whatever you have in your life, my opinion is that if you know that there's something wrong, you try to fix it.
My favorite wrestler growing up was Dean Malenko. He was a very technical wrestler, and when I trained with Shawn Michaels, he wasn't that kind of a technical wrestler. So, when I finally met Regal in 2001, he was that kind of a wrestler, and all of a sudden, I could ask him things, and he would know what I was talking about and how to do it.
The thing that I have to stay away from is sweets. I have a horrible sweet tooth. It's just the worst.
Wrestling is something that nothing else can replace for me.
Seeing your baby in pain and seeing them crying and that sort of thing, and you're tired, and you can do nothing about it - that's, like, one of the most demoralizing things I can think of.
I have to look at my career as 'it was what it was,' but I do wish there was more of it.
