I live for inspiring people to do things they think they can't. My goal is to completely eliminate the word 'can't' from the equation.

In my mind, I always felt like I was worthy. I really felt like, with my career and just the way I did it, it was Hall of Fame-worthy.

I wrote a book called 'Yoga for Regular Guys.' We made the title of the book funny, but it was actually super serious. We were trying to get regular guys to do yoga. It just kept developing from there, and the concept eventually turned into DDP YOGA. I am so passionate about it.

You can sit in the chair and do the workout. There's no other program in the world that is like DDP YOGA.

You rarely see me without a DDP YOGA shirt on. There are times where I wear a regular shirt when I do an interview, and in the middle of it, I go, 'Wait a second. Let me change my shirt.'

You'll never see me in an airport without a DDP YOGA shirt. It says, 'It Ain't Your Mama's Yoga' on the back and 'DDP YOGA' in the front. Every time I walk around, people see the shirt, and it makes them smile.

Wrestling is the first reality show. With a reality show, you never what is real and what is not.

Everybody has some kind of addiction. It's about how you get around that addiction. First, you have to break the habit like anything. You have to define the hurdle or the objective.

I worked the bar business in Fort Lauderdale.

When you become a wrestler at 35 and your career takes off at 40, nobody believes in you. But there are some people out there who watch how I did it, and I did it through intense work ethic.

I always believed I would be in the Hall of Fame when my career came to an end. I just didn't know when.

I was the guy from the Jersey Shore, Springsteen country. We don't do yoga there. And we made fun of anybody who did.

For the first 42 years of my life, I was the guy who wouldn't be caught dead doing yoga.

I'm all about health.

Flexibility is youth.

P90X and Insanity are awesome workouts for young guys who aren't beat up. DDPYoga is for guys who are beat up. It's the fountain of youth for beat-up guys.

I'm not scary anymore.

It took eight years for DDP Yoga to become an overnight sensation.

At 31, I decided to learn how to read and, at 32, read my first book: Lee Iacocca's autobiography. Ten years later, with my friend Larry 'Smokey' Genta, I wrote my first book, which was my proudest accomplishment.

I teach people how to breathe; I teach them how to use dynamic resistance, which is what gets your heart rate jacked up.

I have a huge respect for yoga today.

People used to say, 'Well, how do you fake that?' Two words - we don't. When you got hit with the chair, you got hit with the chair.

In 18th-century Scotland, the main event was the Jacobite rebellion under Bonnie Prince Charlie, so that seems like a nice dramatic backdrop.

Every time I'd read about the stone circles, it would describe how they worked as an astronomical observance. For example, some of the circles are oriented so that at the winter solstice, the sun will strike a standing stone.

What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos.

The Internet has improved a lot in the last few years, but still, you wouldn't want to depend on Web sources for historical analysis. There's just something hard to beat about a book.

I learned just recently, in fact, that a lot of people who read do not form a visual image from what they're reading. They just don't. They follow the events and get the resonance with the language, but they have only a vague, general idea of what the characters look like.

From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.

People ask me why I write strong women, and I say, 'Well, I don't like stupid ones.' Who would want to read about weak and whiny women? Are they people who assume women are weak and whiny? If so, why do they think that?

My parents were both born in 1930. They grew up during the Depression. They wanted their children to have secure lives, to have a good salary and a pension plan. If I could've guaranteed that I'd be a best-selling writer, that would've been one thing, but nobody could say that. So I knew better than to say that was ambition.

I'm not one of these writers who says, 'Oh yes, the next book is due out in one year and three days.' I just say, 'You're gonna get it when it's done. It's gonna be good, but you're not going to get it until it is good.'

There are lines of geomagnetic force running through the Earth's crust, and most of the time, these run in opposing directions - forward and backward. In some places, they deviate and will cross each other, and when that happens, you kind of get a geomagnetic mess going in all different directions. I call these vertices.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

I have all the time and space in the world when I write a book.

It takes me about three years to write a book. They're very complex, and they take a lot of research, but also because the more popular your books get, the more popular you get, and people want to haul you off and look at you.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.

All of my books have an internal geometric shape, and once I've seen the shape, then the writing gets much faster and easier because I now do know where we're going, and I know what's motivating these people, why they were here, and therefore, I have some good idea how they got there, and so I can fill in the missing chunks somewhat more easily.

If you're going to have more than one person read your book, they're going to have totally different opinions and responses. No person - no two people - read the same book.

My sixth book, 'A Breath of Snow and Ashes,' was nominated for a number of book awards, one of which was The Quill Award, and they had it in New York at the Natural History Museum.

'Rob Roy' was a great adaptation. It was a lot better than 'Braveheart.'

It's important to remember that the Jacobite Risings of the 18th century constituted a religious civil war, not a nationalistic movement.

A romance is a courtship story. In the 19th century, the definition of the romance genre was an escape from daily life that included adventure and love and battle. But in the 20th century, that term changed, and now it's deemed only a love story, specifically a courtship story.

Three of the principal cast members of 'Outlander' have come out publically for 'Yes': Sam Heughan, Graham MacTavish and Grant O'Rourke. And the 'Yes' proponents are on fire: idealistic, hopeful, inspired by the idea of change and of democratic self-determination.

Well, I can't remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.

I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading.

When you're reading, you're not where you are; you're in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere.

I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.

I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually.