I want to test my maximum and see how much I can do. And I want to change the world of swimming.
I can't control life for my grandchildren, so how could I control a story? Sometimes I try to force something, and after working and working on that chapter, I realise that I am swimming against the current. I will never get there. So I have to let go of whatever previous idea I had about it and let the characters decide.
When my sister and I were kids, swimming down in Charleston, there was this pizza parlor that had this old Dixieland band play, and I just loved Louis Armstrong and the sound of his voice, and I got up there with the band and started singing Louis Armstrong songs when I was a kid. I have no idea why, but I did it and I loved it.
People were going to geometry class and I was swimming through vats of chili on 'Even Stevens.' It was like a dream!
Being compared to Ian Thorpe, that could be one of the greatest compliments you could ever get in swimming - being compared to him and Mark Spitz.
Swimming is a confusing sport, because sometimes you do it for fun, and other times you do it to not die. And when I'm swimming, sometimes I'm not sure which one it is.
I'm trying to conquer swimming. I'm getting there. I've gotta conquer it. I had a fear of drowning and tunnels and flying. I started flying and got my pilot's license, so I conquered that. Now, I'm onto swimming and tunnels.
It's cool just because I've had this dream of changing the sport of swimming and it's finally happening.
When I put something into motion, the creativity starts to make other people want to jump in, and then a lot of people get employed. I'm just like a shark, in that way. If I stop swimming, I'll die. But, it really is about that shared experience with people. I'm from theater, and that's really what theater feels like.
Well, we've made some changes on this tour. We're no longer sleeping in the parking lots and swimming in the fountains. We've been staying in hotels most of the way, though I will say some hotels have declined to take us because we're just having too much fun.
I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They're all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.
As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.
Swimming has its educational value - mental, moral, and physical - in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.
We've been swimming at nude beaches and I love to go skinny dipping, but I'm sorry, sitting on top of a mountain, that's just, you're trying to show off or something. That's ridiculous.
When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn't be taking any midnight dips - Madinat al-Salam no more.
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
Throughout my whole swimming career, I've never been disqualified once. I've never been warned once.
This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is.
If I could get any animal it would be a dolphin. I want one so bad. Me and my mom went swimming with dolphins and I was like, 'How do we get one of those?' and she was like, 'You can't get a dolphin. What are you gonna do, like, put it in your pool?'
In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about £100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.
