Northern Ireland as a whole is a great snooker country because of Alex Higgins and Dennis Taylor and now of course there is Mark Allen. It's a hotbed of snooker and a place where our sport is always well supported.
I remember that if you went down to the Crucible or other snooker tournaments it was all the snooker writers, and then all of a sudden when the game became popular on television it wasn't only snooker writers: it was what we called special correspondents.
Snooker isn't a sport where you can put on bulk muscle. It's about the cueing and the stamina.
Nobody worked as hard to make snooker a popular sport as I did.
Snooker has just been a British-based sport for such a long time and when I started at 18 the furthest you'd go would be London.
The most important thing, the biggest love of my life, is my snooker. I've never been so emotionally ingrained in something - in a person, an object, anything - as I have in snooker.
The modern athlete is an individual corporation. I'm not quite sure it's very good for sport, or good for team work, or those different things that sport says it's about. This is about business.
I visited a couple of schools where snooker is on the curriculum. They go in everyday and play snooker. In the future, all the top players will be coming from Asia and the Far East.
The most important thing, the biggest love of my life, is my snooker. Ive never been so emotionally ingrained in something - in a person, an object, anything - as I have in snooker.
I have always tried to play the right way, and I honestly believe for the most part the etiquette in snooker is very good. So when there are breaches, and there are, it stands out.
My dad's method in his madness was to try every sport and then observe what I liked. I played football, tennis, golf, cricket but I loved my snooker.
Tennis is a big sport when it comes to betting. Obviously, we as a sport try incredibly hard to keep it clean, and I think we do a very good job with that.
I don't feel people are that interested in snooker any more and the only thing that will get snooker back into the limelight is more controversy.
I believe that I'm not just a fighter in this game; I love to study the sport. And in studying the sport, I believe I have a good eye for the sport, and I'm able to talk about the sport.
I want to be the Cassius Clay of snooker. Cassius is the greatest at boxing and that's what I mean to be at snooker.
It is like any sport. You practise thousands of times and you miss the simplest ball and you don't understand why. But that's why snooker is so special, because all of sudden you can lose everything.