A Quote by Jimmy Hill

Not a lot of people know I wrote the lyrics for the Arsenal club song, 'Good Old Arsenal'. We had a competition on ITV for it, and none of the entries were any good, so I approached their manager, Bertie Mee, and asked him if he would let me have a stab. He did, and within a few weeks they were singing it at Wembley on the way to the 1971 double.
Arsenal have class. I remember when I was at Spurs, the Arsenal players would arrive for matches in their navy blazers with the gold gun emblem sewn into their pockets and grey slacks. We couldn’t match their ground with that beautiful main entrance, marble halls and spiral staircase. Even in 1961 when we won the Double, we were never as big a club as Arsenal.
I had other interesting offers, but for me, it had to be a top club. When you look at Arsenal, with a fantastic manager, good environment, and never any bad press surrounding the club, they are playing attractive football and have a great stadium with great fans.
Arsenal have a great manager in Arsene Wenger, top quality players and an attractive style of play. These were all important factors in me choosing to sign for Arsenal.
Arsenal is Arsenal. It's not a small club; it's a very big club, and it's like a family. It's very good for me because I love my family, and to have another family here is very good.
I was born in Islington and grew up in Islington, so Arsenal was all around me, and supporting them was kind of unavoidable. The first season I started going to watch them was when we did the Double in 1971, so my first heroes were Charlie George, Ray Kennedy, and John Radford.
In my time at Arsenal, we had a really good balance. We had players who were fast, players who were really strong physically, and players who were really creative. When you look at the generation of Arsenal at the moment, they may be playing better football than we used to, but they win less than we used to - so, where's the balance?
I got scouted for Tottenham and was there for three to four weeks before a phone call from Arsenal came. The first session they wanted to sign me so, happy days, I didn't look back. I'm an Arsenal fan, everyone in my family is Arsenal, so it wasn't a hard decision.
Arsenal showed the door to too many people. Why did they let Thierry Henry go? When I found out about his move I realised the Arsenal I played for were finished.
When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.
Arsenal were really interested in me for a long time, and I think that I fit into the football Arsenal play.
Arsenal will always have a place in my heart and that is the same for so many other people too. There's a strong sense of 'family' at the Club and it is why those people that leave so often find their way back, to be around that feeling and I believe that even when you go a bit of you never leaves Arsenal anyway, that is how it has been for me. I'm just so glad that I've been able to be part of the story of the football club.
Arsenal have the most amazing stadium, they have a style of play, they have a beautiful shirt - in every way I consider Arsenal as the ultimate football club.
The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself.
I never said Arsenal fans were not good. I just said I saw real passion when I signed here, and I said Arsenal was a little bit different. That is the only thing I said.
I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.
I'm very happy to have been a player who played for Arsenal, because the fans were always great to me - the manager, everyone, the players - and if I can just wish them the best of luck. They know, no matter what happened, they will always be in my heart because I love the club.
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