From age eleven to age sixteen I lived a spartan life without the usual adolescent uncertainty. I wanted to be the best swimmer in the world, and there was nothing else.

I have an uncompromising relationship with my goals.

If you can just immerse yourself in your life, it doesn't matter what you do everyday. Just do it intensely. Be in it, so that when you go to sleep you're exhausted every night and you say, 'Whoa, I just couldn't have done any more with that day.'

You have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you as we all do. None of us ever get through this life without heartache, without turmoil, and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality, you find your way.

There is... nothing greater than touching the shore after crossing some great body of water knowing that I've done it with my own two arms and legs.

I think I'm going to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.

I wanted to teach myself some life lessons at the age of 60 and one of them was that you don't give up.

A lot of athletes have this sort of invincibility: [The jellyfish] should worry about me. I don't worry about them. I'll just swim right through them.

This journey has always been about reaching your own other shore no matter what it is, and that dream continues.

Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It's ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it you don't wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours - the loneness of the long distance runner.

When you reach for the horizon, as I've proven, you may not get there, but what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down. What a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons.

The spirit is larger than the body. The body is pathetic compared to what we have inside us

When you achieve your Dreams It's not so much what you get, It's who you become.

If you want to touch the other shore badly enough, barring an impossible situation, you will. If your desire is diluted for any reason, you'll never make it.

When I walk up on that shore in Florida, I want millions of those AARP sisters and brothers to look at me and say, 'I'm going to go write that novel I thought it was too late to do. I'm going to go work in Africa on that farm that those people need help at. I'm going to adopt a child. It's not too late, I can still live my dreams.'