I love sweets. Like, every week of my life, I've had a cheat day.
Daniel Bryan
For some reason, the fans got behind me, and I don't know exactly why that is. I wasn't supposed to main event WrestleMania XXX, but the fans were so vocal about it that the fans had no choice but to put me in the match. I've had a lot of lucky breaks.
Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it's about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.
I don't want to live my life to entertain other people. I have other things that I'd like to do.
I've lifted weights ever since I was a teenager, but I started going more towards the Olympic weightlifting style, which is clean and jerk.
Sometimes, things just fall into your lap, and that's pretty incredible.
I think of Bret Hart as somebody who held the Intercontinental championship like it was the World Heavyweight championship. Every title match he was in felt important, like it was the most important thing on the show. The way he carried himself and the matches he had, it was just everything I thought a champion should be.
If you want to grow a beard like mine, the only thing I can tell you is that you have to have patience. You just have to let it grow.
I've always thought Shawn Michaels's story is fascinating.
I love wrestling, and I love the entertainment aspect of wrestling, but the rest of my life, I just want to be able to live and enjoy my life. I don't want to be living it essentially for other people's entertainment.
I feel like a lot of fans would like to see me with the heavyweight championship.
I'm bigger now than when I was eating meat. My lifts in the gym are better. I'm in better shape.
I've always respected and appreciated Punk, but we never really hung out. We came from the same route, but we didn't necessarily hang out in the same circles. I've always had a great appreciation and respect for his hard work.
With ladder matches, you can't expect anything other than craziness.
When I first got to WWE, the head of talent relations was John Laurinaitis, who is now my father-in-law, and the first thing I thought when I saw everything that he had to do is, I thought, 'I would never, in a million years, ever want that job. You could not pay me enough money to have that job.'
My mind thinks in wrestling. As I'm thinking of things and my mind is being creative, it constantly keeps going back to wrestling. That's my inspiration, and to not be able to express that puts me in a spot where I almost don't know what to do with myself.
My No. 1 dream match is Brock Lesnar. And I want that to be a WrestleMania match. I don't know if the WWE will ever let that happen, because they might be afraid he might legitimately hurt me pretty bad.
The best parenting advice I actually got was from Shane McMahon. He was great with me when Brie was pregnant and all that. He said, 'When you have that baby, make sure you take care of Brie first.'
If it weren't for the Internet, WWE probably wouldn't even know my name. If I had to rely on 'Pro Wrestling Illustrated' to get my name out there, it would have been a much more difficult road.
My favorite wrestler growing up was Dean Malenko. He was a very technical wrestler, and when I trained with Shawn Michaels, he wasn't that kind of a technical wrestler. So, when I finally met Regal in 2001, he was that kind of a wrestler, and all of a sudden, I could ask him things, and he would know what I was talking about and how to do it.
I've never really been a character on TV. I think, if possible, you want to portray yourself. If you're in a situation where you're supposed to react, you need to react.
Me, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Lyoto Machida, former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion, all shared a two-bedroom apartment together.
What we do is entertainment. We entertain people. Sometimes we inspire people, but sometimes we are just a way to fill their time.
Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao was one of the worst boxing matches I've ever seen, but millions of people watched it because of the personalities involved.
My passion is the wrestling.
I didn't really grow up playing video games. I had an original Nintendo after the original Nintendo was cool.
I get this anxiety in cities and places like that. When you grow up in kind of a small town and when you grow up around a lot of green and trees and nature and that sort of thing, sometimes I think it's a little mentally disconcerting to be around this concrete.
I went from being a guy who was sparingly being used on television to being the World Heavyweight Champion and the focus of a lot of the storylines on Smackdown.
I used to be vegan. I'm not anymore, but I don't eat hardly any meat. But it's nice for me to go to a place like Chipotle where I can get some fresh veggies, some brown rice, some black beans, and all that kind of stuff.
I wasn't a great athlete.
When I watch myself, I see nothing but faults, like, 'This I need to do different, this I need to do different,' and so if there comes a point in time where I'm like, 'Man, this whole thing is just getting really stale,' I am not opposed to being the bad guy again.
I love wrestling, but to wrestle just one style for the rest of my life seems like it would really hold me down creatively.
Sometimes there's cities where it's just hard to find healthy food. You just have to be prepared.
Miz and I have known each other for a long time, and we really know, like, how to get at each other's nerves.
I loved playing football, but I hated the games because it's a lot of pressure. I just loved putting on the pads and hitting my friends.
I think whatever you have in your life, my opinion is that if you know that there's something wrong, you try to fix it.
To me, the funnest part of wrestling is evolving. If you stay the same all the time, you're eventually going to be left behind.
My wife and I are very blessed. I am very grateful for the life that we lead.
A lot of people thought you couldn't be a top-level athlete as a vegan, but people like Mac Danzig and Jake Shields are proving that's wrong. And it's better for me as a performer.
My diet is very kale-heavy. It's so nutrient-dense. I stay away from fake processed stuff.
You have to realize that a lot of life is just fortune and the ebbs of flows of what goes on.
Every year, I say the Seahawks are going to win the Super Bowl. There's no doubt in my mind every single year. And you have to keep in mind this was well before the Seahawks were good. This was, like, 2-14, drafting-Rick-Mirer Seahawks. I would still be saying they were going to win the Super Bowl.
I keep trying to convince people that I'm OK to wrestle, and I think that's probably the hard part. A lot of times I'm trying to convince myself, too, that I can wrestle. It's really hard, because the concussion issue is very subjective, and that's the part that a lot of people don't understand.
I would read a lot about how to be a dad. I had never changed a diaper before we had Birdie.
I think fans always want something new, but they want somebody who can deliver - to go out there and really entertain them and have good matches.
Wrestling is more of a creative outlet, and especially for somebody like me, I view it as my creative outlet. Not all WWE superstars and not all wrestlers view it that way, but that's how I view it, and that's one of the ways my mind works creatively.
The blessings wrestling has given me have allowed me to find some new passions, but it's really hard when you've got that first love, and nothing really replaces it.
I'm pretty much friendly and compassionate to everybody. But not to people in the ring.
WWE doesn't owe us anything.
If you watch dogs play, they run and they fight, but they don't fight to hurt each other. They just play. And that's been me my entire life.
