A Quote by Phil Niekro

There's very few pitching coaches that I worked with that actually came out on the mound and told me what I was doing wrong with the knuckleball. Because they just didn't know. So I had to figure it out. I was on my own.
That whole thing about masturbating. Most girls, I guess nobody has to tell them, they just figure it out. I had to be told. Some girl actually had to show me a hairbrush and demonstrate exactly what to do. I just never figured that stuff out naturally.
I remember one time going out to the mound to talk with Bob Gibson. He told me to get back behind the batter; that the only thing I knew about pitching was that it was hard to hit!
I am being very humble about the Arab Spring. There's kind of a competition out there, you might have noticed, of who can be the first to say the Arab Spring is going to fail. Everyone says, "I told you so, I told you so about the Muslim Brotherhood." I have no desire to tell anyone anything. I don't know. I'm just listening, watching. It may turn out all these people are right, they may be wrong. They may be right this year and wrong next year, by the way. I'm just trying to listen day to day, figure it out.
As soon as I got out there I felt a strange relationship with the pitcher's mound. It was as if I'd been born out there. Pitching just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Striking out batters was easy.
The two biggest things that translate from a pitching mound to hunting and fishing are patience and perseverance. When you're on the mound, you have to take the game one pitch at a time, regardless of the score, and that approach helps when I'm in the woods or out on the water as well.
I have never fanned out at all, actually. I mean, there's only a few people that I have fanned out about before: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, pretty much anyone from 'Star Wars.' But I don't usually fan out at all, just because they're all people just doing their jobs. It's exciting because they do very good work!
I had a very well-respected writer ask me point blank to my face whether it actually mattered to me. Now, without wanting to reach out and just strangle him or send a few F-bombs his way, I just bit my tongue, told him he offended me and walked away.
No one's ever really cared about me being bisexual, and I only came out because I had always been out; it's just the general public didn't know. I'm quite fearless. I'm like, 'Let's just go out there and do this and see what happens.'
I'd have to say that "Mr. Crowley" in my most memorable solo... I had spent hours trying to figure out a solo for the song ... Ozzy came in and said "it's crap - everything you're playing is crap" .. he told me to get in there and just play how I felt. He made me really nervous, so I just played anything. When I came back to listen to it, he said it was great.
If I had someone buttering me up, maybe I'd have worked out. You don't even know where I came from. Nobody wants to come out here.
The game can come down to one pitch. But when you're actually out there on the mound and when you're pitching, you can't be worrying about the margin of error or whatnot. You have to go with your strengths and what you believe is the right pitch and keep executing pitches.
But here's the deal: If I were smart, I could figure out curling. If I were even smarter, I could figure out why people would actually watch other people doing it. I have tried. I can't. I can't even figure out the object of the game. Is it like darts? I just don't get it.
Out all of these zillions of letters, one of the first ones that came was, as it turned out from Johnny Carson within the last five or six weeks of his life. I had worked with him. He lost a son who had worked for me.
Well first of all I was nine weeks pregnant at the time and no one knew it. So it was - it had a whole other meaning for me not just because I had to let the dress out, you know, every few days before the actual day. But, you know, because that was the, you know, more important than anything else that was going on in my life. But in terms of actually winning I think I had been nominated four or five times before then. And every one of my co-stars had won up until that point.
Knuckleball pitching is a very small fraternity.
We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.
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