Top 34 Gretzky Quotes & Sayings

I was in Toronto with my parents, and my dad took me to an outdoor hockey rink. I was 3 or 4, and I just remember everything about that day. For some reason, I thought, 'This is it. This is what I'm supposed to do.' And this is around the time that Gretzky came to L.A., so I immediately joined a hockey league.

Understand the "Gretzky Factor": Cultivate an instinct, a "touch", call it what you will, that enables you to know both where the "puck" is now and where it will be soon.

We believe in the wisdom once expressed by the hockey star Wayne Gretzky, who explained his success by saying, 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.'

By far Gretzky is the most talented player ever. Every time he gets the puck something exciting happens.

I always wanted to be like Mark Messier and I loved Wayne Gretzky, the same as other kids. But it was also really special for me to see the Black players that were in the NHL.

All my career I've gone to teams on the decline. I went to Quebec when they were losing the Stastny brothers. I went to Edmonton after they lost Gretzky and Messier. I went to Anaheim when it was an expansion team. I came to Montreal after they'd won the Cup and were headed down. I was beginning to think it was me.

Talented people can predict with great accuracy what's about to happen just a tiny bit ahead of their competitors. It might be two seconds ahead, or two hundredths of a second, or two days. Napoleon on an eighteenth century battlefield had something more like a two-day advantage. Wayne Gretzky in a hockey game was probably a second ahead of everyone else on the ice.

I want to be a winner. But you can see Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Wayne Gretzky - that kind of people - where you can see and say yeah, this is players who win everything. I want to be in this page, too.

There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will.

If Gretzky was velvet, Ovechkin is electricity.

You look at the best players in the game - Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr - they didn't sit on the couch and then one day join the NHL. They worked on their game. Their talent was perseverance, dedication. Those are talents to me; that's what gets you to the NHL.

I watched Gretzky, I watched Lemieux. Maybe it's the time when you're playing, but for a kid coming into the league, you play the Boston Bruins and you just watched Bobby Orr.

Well, unless you're Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan, you need the full support of your team.

When you think of Canada, you think of hockey and you think of Wayne Gretzky.

On how he met Wayne Gretzky: I was in L.A. preparing for Indian Wells, and a mutual friend asked if I'd like to have dinner with him. I think one of his daughters plays tennis so he knew about me. It was obviously something I was excited to do, and I left the dinner pretty amazed.

Wayne Gretzky's talent doesn't come from studying everything he's experienced in hockey and making long-term game plans. It comes from constantly taking in all the data that's happening in the moment on the ice, and instantly generating constant predictions based on super-efficient mental models he's built in his head. Technology has to work more like Gretzky.

I get to play behind Al MacInnis and learn from him. I get to play with Brett Hull. There were like six or seven Hall of Famers that I would play with during my time in St. Louis. I mean, Wayne Gretzky was traded there my first year.

The wrestling equivalent to Wayne Gretzky? That's Shawn Michaels.

The first time I met Wayne Gretzky... he never said anything back.

I go by the rule of Gretzky: you gotta be there before the puck gets there, or you're going to get beat.

When you think of hockey, when you think of Canada, you think of Wayne Gretzky.

My dad started taking me to Winnipeg games when I was 3 or 4. As a kid, I loved Wayne Gretzky, and I remember the first game I got to see him play against the Jets. The Kings beat the Jets, and I was happy that they did. Gretzky left the game after the first period, and I was upset about that.

It was okay for Wayne Gretzky's dad, for instance, to give him a hockey stick, or Joe Montana's dad to give him a football, or Larry Bird's dad to give him a basketball, but it wasn't okay for Gloria Connors to give her son a tennis racquet.

Chunking makes our brains more efficient. The more you can chunk something, the faster and easier you can process it. Wayne Gretzky had chunked hockey like no one before or since. Talented people have supremely chunked whatever they become talented at doing.

I like to think of the world's greatest athlete coming up to bat against me - Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don't care who it is - and I'm looking at him thinking, you have no chance.

Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player of all-time, I don't think there is any debate about that. If you look at the records he holds, they'll never be broken or touched. He wasn't the biggest, wasn't the fastest, and didn't have the hardest shot, but no one saw the game developing the way he saw the game develop.

In the '80s, when Gretzky came to the World Championships in the second or third game, you'd see this guy skating circles around the other ones. Unbelievable.

He knows all the golf lingo. You know? You hit your ball, he's like "there's a golf shot. That's a golf shot." Well of course it's a golf shot; I just hit a golf ball. You don't see Gretzky skating around going "there's a hockey shot, that's a hockey shot."

I have played a handful of rounds of golf with Wayne Gretzky.

I'd really like to have my own style of game and be known as Jason Spezza, not a Mario Lemieux or Wayne Gretzky 'clone.'

I realize there will not be another Gretzky, and I will be the first one to say I will not break his records, .. But for him to say that I could, it means I am doing something right. It was probably the best compliment I could get. I'm going to remember it.

Tiger Woods, Larry Bird, Wayne Gretzky, a pitcher just before a game, I would imagine they all have nervous energy. But as you perform, the nervous energy dissipates and you start to relax and you start to do what you do best.

The only way you can check Gretzky is to hit him when he is standing still singing the national anthem.

I'd been playing everything and decided that this was something I maybe wanted to make a career out of. I knew where some companies were, but I saw the name 'Bethesda, Maryland' on 'Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3.'