Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Jim Cornette

Without talent, I don't care how funny the writers are or how many comedy lines they come up, without wrestlers you can't have a wrestling program.

Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler's match was the one thing people believed most about wrestling in the last 35 years.

MMA and the UFC have taken all of the pro wrestling fans because it's pro wrestling from 30 years ago, just in an Octagon and the fights happen to be real. But they're marketed exactly the same way.

People naturally want to see two interesting people - one that they're predisposed possibly to like and one that they're predisposed to dislike - have a fight and see who wins.

I'm impressed with what the NWA has done, what Billy Corgan and Dave Lagana and those guys have done, establishing the NWA title to mean more and have more interest again.

People that lie to me generally get banished or vanished to the planet Pluto in my mind.

I've always been a fan of Bobby Roode's.

I had always in the past thought The Ultimate Warrior was the epitome of a guy making money with no talent.

Modern day wrestlers are fans of the performance of wrestling instead of the concept of wrestling.

There's no casual wrestling fan anymore.

The way that you teach wrestling is by finding good talent that you think can learn and putting them in the ring with a variety of other good talents who have experience and giving them the opportunity to pick things up.

They way new stars were made in WCW and WWE was by beating the established guys and getting in that mix. When you only have one established guy, that's gonna be hard.

I had to spend eleven months in the same room with Vince Russo and Vince McMahon, that's where I really got to hate life in general.

I came along the decade after the generation where a lot of heels were still getting stabbed, so I was always looking for it. I had a bullet-proof vest in a couple places.

Since I left the wrestling business and got in the Jim Cornette business, my blood pressure is down considerably.

One of the greatest matches I ever saw was Jerry Lawler against Terry Funk in the Memphis Midsouth Coliseum, but there was Flair vs. Steamboat in Nashville back in '89.

You can make a really good one minute trailer out of a really stinky two hour movie.

'Bullet' Bob was one of the most important parts of Smoky Mountain from the start. He was a retired wrestling legend and talked better than anyone on the roster.

I've had experience in management and TV and hope to be able to lend some of that to TNA and maybe persuade some wrestlers to come in this direction because of the influence I've had on their careers in the past.

Two things I have never done and never plan to do are catch Coronavirus or meet Jelly Nutella in person.

You have to look like an athlete and you have to look like you could whip somebody. And let's face it, unfortunately Shawn Michaels couldn't whip anybody in a real fight as proven with every single fight he's ever gotten into with everybody in the business.

John Cena's success was the least surprising.

I know Vince made the call for Roman Reigns to win the Royal Rumble and be the guy. We know that much. I don't know what knucklehead didn't say to Vince that maybe we shouldn't put Daniel Bryan in the Royal Rumble.

I thought the Rousey match was the best major league debut in the history of wrestling. They did the right thing at the right time at the right pace and took people on a roller coaster ride. That, to me, was a pro wrestling match. I couldn't find fault with it, except I wish that Ronda had come out with her game face on when she did her entrance.

People always say, 'You can't go home again,' but every time I go to the Mid-Atlantic Wrestling Legends Fanfest in Charlotte, it feels like I have.

I went on a diet and went from 248 pounds to 211.

I feel like there's no reason to put myself through what I put myself through for 20-something years on airplanes, especially these days. You don't know whether your pilot is going to drop dead over the ocean; you don't know when you try to land whether the wheels are going to come down; you can be searched and seized and detained and quarantined.

The Rock 'n' Roll Express and the '80s NWA crew; Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, Magnum TA, Dusty Rhodes - that was a great crew of talent and they were all so great to work with.

It's said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In that case, the WWE 'creative' team must be as crazy as a rainbow trout in a car wash.

I'm not looking to be a superstar. That's why I'm positioned as the face of TNA.

Even if people that I was in love with - even if Bobby Fulton inherited a billion dollars and opened All Elite Wrestling, I was never going to be the manager of The Revival on a weekly television basis ever because that would require me being on the road on a weekly basis.

Lio Rush, this little guy is a perfect heel manager, updated for modern times.

I met Rick Rubin through Cat Collins, a DJ friend of mine that had worked for Rubin at American Recordings.

I'm the only person in wrestling that realizes I'm too old to do this anymore, and that's why I'm not a performer and I'm not going to be on 'ROH.'

Tracy Smothers was the epitome of the perfect Smoky Mountain hero. He was legitimate.

It's a tossup on whether WWE is going to insult your intelligence, religion or sexual preference. It's become a joke and a farce.

I would love to see TNA get a developmental program.

Every wrestling show is now designed to be the greatest show ever. In contrast, the NWA show is different. It didn't tire people out to watch, something was allowed to register. It is the exact antithesis of planned, big budget, choreographed, scripted sports entertainment, and that is what makes the show so different.

The biggest thing I want to do is not travel as much as possible. I enjoy not traveling very much.

Maybe Rock and Elizabeth Warren could team up and shore up each other's weaknesses. Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything and all the experience, and The Rock could sell it to the people, 'cause the people could smell what Rock is cooking.

There's probably as many rules of thumb to wrestling as anything in the world, and then there's just as many exceptions to every one of those rules because somebody doesn't fit that thumb.

I've been a fan of one particular guy since I first saw him in 'Ring of Honor' eight years ago. He was Tyler Black then, but he's Seth Rollins now. And I think he's just the whole package.

When you are as big and strong as Strowman, WWE notices you and basically pays you to go to school. He was paid to train, has a guaranteed contract, and gets paid whether he wrestles or not. He couldn't survive in the actual wrestling business. He never had to pay his dues.

Johnny Valentine's the one who said, 'I can't make them believe that wrestling is real, but I can make them believe I'm real.' It would take him forever because he was just stinkingly boring for 30 minutes of the 40-minute match, but he would let people hit him as hard as they could, and he would hit people as hard as he could.

Cowboy James Storm and Eli Drake, those guys can talk and rile the people up.

I eliminated stress by eliminating people that I don't enjoy working with.

Probably the biggest-kept secret about 'Ring of Honor' is that when you go to see a live show - I've had people in their 60s from down in North Carolina that have seen a lot of wrestling tell me that it was the greatest live wrestling show they've ever been to. The atmosphere is off the charts.

We would get VHS tapes from wrestlers who wanted to come to Smoky Mountain. I got this tape from a guy called Lance Storm who I saw leaping from the top rope and cutting these great dropkicks. And the kid Chris Jericho he was with wasn't too bad either.

From the time I was 5 years old, I collected comic books.

Nick Aldis is a great champion. He looks like a professional athlete. He dresses like one. He carries it well.

As far as the NWA tag-team wrestling of the '80s - and I know you're talking some heavy hitters there - the first thing people will always say is The Midnight and Rock 'N' Roll Express. We invented things as we went along that people had never seen. It was always different. And it was always good.

Life is too short to have anybody named McMahon in mine.

I think people are realizing that whereas now the 'Ultimate Fighting Championship' has taken over what people used to like about pro wrestling in the '70s and '80s. We just want to see who's going to fight for the title.

You can make kids and fans happy without calling them on the court in the last three minutes of the NBA Finals.

Old school fans are going to be shocked at just how much of the pro wrestling they grew up watching was, indeed, contrived, manipulated or, as it's called in the business, 'worked.'

Trevor Murdoch is mad, bad and dangerous. He's the only man I know that can strap a bucket of fried chicken on his back and ride a motor scooter across Ethiopia.

Amateur wrestling was never considered a big box office draw because they're really competing but they're not getting a chance to call each other 16 kinds of names before the fight to get you interested.

When you think that in the '50s there was wrestling and boxing - that was it. There wasn't mixed martial arts at all; there wasn't even karate in the United States.

In 1986, wrestling was so huge in Charlotte that we did four events at the Coliseum with the Rock 'N' Roll and the Midnights in a 10-week period - and sold almost 45,000 tickets and drew almost $400,000 at the gate.

I can stay under 215 pounds, which is pretty good for me, if I stay off the road. If I go on the road, I invariably eat garbage and start to lose my girlish figure.