Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Tony Pulis

The great thing for me is I wasn't a great player - I managed at the lower level and managed to be successful and that gives great hope to everyone else.

I've come from a fantastic, working class area and to actually have the fortune to be given that opportunity to get out of that has never left me. I was determined from the first day I left to make the most of it and that will never stop.

Whichever way the result goes, my 1,000th game will be at Stoke and I had great times there.

Age is just a number. For 18 months at Boro I was the first one in at training and one of the last out. I look at people like Manuel Pellegrini and Marcelo Bielsa and think they all have something to offer.

Referees will make good decisions and bad ones. But when they make decisions actually affecting a game of football, it's disappointing.

I always think the best players come from the areas where there are loads of chimney pots, where they have been brought up a little bit tougher than the others.

In football if you don't spend the money well enough it comes back to bite you, over not one season but two or three!

It must be a nightmare for football managers' wives, putting up with us.

People go on about my style of play. But I tell you what I do - I go into football clubs, I try to find out what systems suit the players and I try to get the damnedest out of those players. That's what I've done everywhere I've been.

There are loads of good principles we've lost as a nation. Discipline. Organisation. Respect. I was brought up with those.

Stoke-on-Trent - forget about the football club, or the people at the football club, and the supporters - Stoke-on-Trent is a wonderful place.

When you lose a game you still get as disappointed, 24 years on. Losing a game of football, even when you have played well, kills you.

If you're hiring a manager for two to three years, you need to get it right.

I watched Cardiff when I was a young boy. I also watched Newport. If I wasn't playing games on Saturday, for Newport YMCA or Pill, I would jump on a train and get to watch Cardiff.

That's management. It's a social job as much as anything else, finding out what people are like, seeing through them. There have been good players and not-so-good players who I have moved along because I thought there would be a clash of character.

I have been animated all my life on the bench.

Everything about the Premier League is wonderful, even when you get beat.

My biggest concern for the country is that many kids are now just looking at their parents who've lived on benefit and think that's the norm. It's so sad.

That's what all the good players do. They actually go out and perform on the pitch.

The Premier League is a wonderful league, the best league in the world, and there are a lot of clubs who overachieve and they overachieve massively. Because of results they get pushed down instead of people scratching the surface and seeing what is really happening.

We push experience aside and forget about people far too quickly.

If you don't work hard at it, nothing's given in this game.

It's annoying and disappointing that people think I just keep clubs up.

I have read loads of books on Napoleon. For him to come from nothing and then lead his country, that fascinated me. It doesn't matter what you think of him. He did it.

I knew the day I left Newport that if I came back, I'd failed. The fear of losing the game, of having to go home and tell my family, 'I tried but it didn't work out,' has haunted me. It is still there, and it is a strength and a weakness.

People have a perception of you and that's very difficult to change.

I'm very determined, single-minded, just ask the wife.

I hope Darren Moore is a good manager, when he was my captain at Portsmouth, he could lead battleships out of water, he was that good.

What really, really matters is the dressing room and the people on the training ground being very, very focused in what we are trying to achieve on and off the ball.

When you're young you say things you maybe regret, I have been there and I am sure every player has, you say something you wish you hadn't and you learn from these things.

It's no good me talking about my future. I don't determine my future, other people do.

If a top four job came along, I don't think people will look at Tony Pulis to do that.

I have this restlessness. I'm relentless to do things. My wife will say I'm an absolute nightmare.

Look, you are going to get criticism if things don't go well.

I find rowing very boring, I've got to be honest.

Stoke-on-Trent is totally and utterly different to South London.

When you lose a game of football, you can still be a winner by taking it on the chin and getting on with it.

I've actually carried the Olympic torch through Stoke-on-Trent.

You get pigeonholed. You accept it or you fight it. I've accepted it.

What people don't talk about is I've been promoted out of every division and been to the final of an FA Cup.

My approach to every game is the same.

I enjoy the gym. I think if you're fit in your body, you're fit in your mind. So I get up most mornings and I'm first there usually. I stay in there for an hour, an hour and a half, do my work, shower and then I have a nice breakfast.

I've been happy at all the clubs I've been at.

We all get knocked down in life, the big thing is getting back up.

I have always been interested in history.

When things aren't right, I can overreact because of the fear of losing everything. The insecurity drives me, and helps keep my feet on the ground.

Everybody wants things now. If I hadn't been given the time at Stoke, or at other clubs earlier in my career, I don't think I would have ever been successful.

What frustrates me more than anything is that I push on so far and people become complacent, lose that bit of edge, and it's very difficult to keep driving people on. That's probably the greatest fault of mine: I expect everybody to be like me.

I don't like fiction, I like reading proper history.

I just get on with my job and do that job to the best of my ability.

When you have seven grandchildren and you've been around them a while, they soften you up. But there's still that little streak in me that if I need to make sure something has to be done, then it gets done.

People talk about me being a firefighter, but I have also been very successful. It annoys me that in this country you get pigeon-holed for certain things.

Middlesbrough took a lot out of me, it was enjoyable but draining.

I've always been bloody single minded, which is probably why I've been in the game so long.

You get spits and spats all the time in football.

Everyone talks about not being relegated, but as a manager I have got a few promotions.

Every job I've had I feel lucky to have had. Of all the family, I was the lucky one. I've been very fortunate. I don't regret anything, I don't crave anything.

I keep saying, and I've said it to the players, what happens in a dressing room stays in a dressing room, whether that's with me and a player, whether it's two players together, whether it's the coaching staff and the players. I just think it's almost a sacred environment and that trust in that area is unbreakable.

Social media is good in some ways, for me to Skype my son and grandchildren every day in America is wonderful. But then you've got other things on the Internet which are absolutely dreadful. It's poisonous and there should be greater control of that. You're not going to change it, though, so you have to work with it.

There are players like that - you know they have been rascals, and that you can bring them in, give them a new environment and get a length of time out of them, but they will always return to type. You can get something out of them, then you have to get rid of them.