“The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.”

“The past is as important as the future, but we only live in the here and now.”

“I'd just killed some of the best riders in the world - and I was clean. I'd taken nothing - no EPO, no cortisone, no testosterone, no painkillers, no caffeine. I had justified to myself that I was ...”

“What an idiot I'd been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.”

“This place has been my home. They liked me here. Not any more. Now they will look the other way. Now I don't belong.”

“It was very quiet at the hotel, as if there had been a death in the family. When you have quit the Tour, nobody really knows what to say or do. (...) Everything I'd previously achieved meant nothin...”

“Jesus Christ, it's like living with Stevie bloody Nicks,' I said, 'only without the cocaine, which would be more fun.”

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."..."There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."..."But they used to take ...”

“Happiness is my drug of choice.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”

“Victory settles a lot of arguments in most men's heads.”

“To obtain victory by any means and with any weapon.”

“When you're in a weak position, getting the best deal possible is a victory.”