About this sport, you gotta kind of stay active. If you're not active, you're easily forgotten. It's like out of sight, out of mind.

I want to have a bank account that represents me being a pro athlete.

Whether it's Bellator, OneFC, World Series, whatever, the door's open for me. Financial stability is the most important thing for me.

To be in the UFC and have the name but not the earnings, good for you, you get a hand clasp and a shake and a don't let the door hit you on the way out sort of thing.

I want to exit from this sport with my head intact.

At the end of the day, I know what I bring to the table.

You go out there and say I fight for the UFC, people know exactly what that is.

You cant really put a value on the UFC name. That alone has value in itself.

I don't want to be resentful to the sport. I want to be able to leave the sport on a high note.

I want to be in my prime making the big money, enough money to put away so I can do something.

You just take your hits on the chin and move on, that's life.

I've never been one to shy away from a challenge and I've never been one to shay away from talking a big game.

I like to put my money where my mouth is and go out there and perform and do what I gotta do.

It's MMA, man, the wild, wild west. You can just expect that anything can happen, and that's just where I'm at with things.

I'm in this to change my life, to change my fortunes. I'm not in there to just fight for free.

I fight for people's entertainment, but at the same time that entertainment comes at a cost.

I got to the pinnacle of the sport for a reason and that's to make money. I didn't come here just to give handouts.

I'm a lot bigger than Faber, I'm pretty sure I'm a lot stronger than Faber and I'm pretty sure I'm a lot faster than Faber.

You can't keep a star from shining and my star's going to shine bright.

It's the fight game. I'm ready for everything.

We're all fighting for a reason. We're not fighting to just fight. There's got to be some type of reward at the end of the rainbow and that reward is a big, shiny, UFC gold belt. That changes every fighter's life dramatically for the better.

If we're just going to have contenders fighting just to fight, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Then I might as well just start jumping around divisions too because there's a lot of fun fights for myself in other divisions that I think I would love to entertain.

I'm too long, I'm too rangy, I can box, I can kick, I can wrestle, I can do jiu-jitsu.

Even when I teach my MMA classes in the gym, it's hard to teach what I do. It's more of state of flow, a state of feel. It's not a robotic thing like one, two, three, kick, one, two, three, switch, jab, cross. It's completely unorthodox. Everything is about rhythm, tempo and pace. It's a different style, man.

I bring the funk. It's a different style.

My comfortability is always going favor the grappling side, that's the path of least resistance. But, I don't need necessarily need to force the takedowns like I used to before.

At the end of the day, Cejudo's a tough competitor but I think he's a flyweight.

I'm not about trying to hand pick my fights and tip toe around the competition.

I'm about fighting the best guys.

I always felt like the UFC brass kind of had it out for me.

At the end of the day, I feel like I've never had an easy break in terms of opponents.

MMA is not one of those up and down basketball seasons where you have a ton of games and you can still make the playoffs. It doesn't work like that in MMA. You get a couple losses, you get washed up, you get the door slammed behind you and they bring in the next person behind you who is here to take your place.

Fighters don't just fight. Not the good ones who have long, long success. The guys who make championship runs. The guys who fight for world titles. They get fizzled out, chewed up and spit out like a revolving door and then the next guy or the next female comes in to take their spot.

Do you think the UFC is going to owe you a favor when you step up on short notice when nobody else is doing it? There's a reason a whole bunch of us aren't doing it. If you want to be that scapegoat, and think that the UFC's going to owe you one, good luck with that. Let me know how that goes.

As history has shown, I don't think the UFC is in the business of doing favors for other people.

When you look at the U.S., it's a little weird, man because we have so many other sports and other things that we can watch and support that it's hard to get the support of an entire country around you.

Obviously, I rep Jamaica. I'm a first generation born Jamaican-American. My parents are born and raised in Jamaica, my grandparents are born and raised in Jamaica, my other family still lives in Jamaica, and I still go back there.

I think everyone is kind of an immigrant somehow, and I wasn't raised in an American society at home. My household was a Jamaican household, so I got all my traditions, all my roots and culture intact, so I'm able to support both countries.

There's a lot of American citizens out there that do jobs that they hate, day in and day out. For me to do what I love to do, with people that I like and enjoy being around who are chasing the same dream, same passions, to have that around you day in and day out, I think it says a lot.

I can never complain about the situation that I'm in. I try to put everything into perspective.

I'm always a guy that looks at every situation as glass half full.

You put me in there with anybody at '35 or '45, I get on your back, I take you down, it's going to be a long night and it's a dangerous situation to be in.

You change the mind and world of one individual and that's huge, man. You reach one person and that starts a spiral effect and starts to snowball. I think that's the one thing as an athlete we should all focus on doing and that's striving to give back in a positive manner.

I'm a hard guy to hit and take down, and once I get you on the ground I'm going to choke you out. Even if you resist a few of the other attempts I'm going to get you one way or the other. I'm like the Boogeyman... I'm gonna get you.

I think it's huge to set a good example. Whether you like it or not, as a professional athlete you are always going to be projected out into that spotlight of judgement. People are always going to judge every single thing we do and I think it's cool to just be real with yourself.

People can forget about you so quickly and that's not what I want. I want to keep people talking because at the end of the day that's what is going to get you paid. People have to want to care to watch you fight and you have to be relevant.

I like to think I defied the odds my entire life, definitely my entire athletic career.

I think I bring a different flavor to the game, both inside and outside the Octagon.

Being a wrestler, it can get rough in terms of your mindset, just having that mentality embedded in you where you just wanna go, go, go, 100 miles per hour, always redlining your body and never actually taking the time out to let your body recover the right way. As I got older, I started to realized that less sometimes is more.

What many fans don't realize with fighters, this is our job. But at the same time outside of this, we have regular lives where we do the same things that everybody else does. We have the problems. We get speeding tickets, we get pulled over, we have family issues, we have girlfriend issues, we have issues amongst ourselves, self doubt.