Top 30 Marv Levy Quotes

I’m about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don’t know if anybody wants to read it. It’s on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, ‘Okay, that’s another one.’ They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.

Experience should be a plus as long as it doesn’t become complacency. If you say, ‘We’re not going to change; we didn’t do it that way before,’ then you’ve become too old.

I exercise, walk a lot, and break into the occasional trot. I also lift weights three days a week, and I like to read about what makes a good diet. Overall, I do follow a healthy lifestyle.

As coaches, we learn to accept criticism for our decisions. If a writer says you shouldn’t have gone for it on fourth-and-one, we understand that’s part of the job. We expect it.

I don’t know if there ever has been anyone in the NFL who plays his position as well as Steve Tasker.

In Buffalo, you can’t imagine how much people revere Fred Jackson because of his high character, his community involvement, coming from a Division III school.

My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.

I took all the courses you would need to be able to go to law school. But my experience in college with football made me want to go into coaching.

Bill Polian and I agreed when we first came together with the Buffalo Bills that we’d bring players only of high character to the team.

Teaching is very important. The nature of your personality isn’t that important. Lombardi was very extraverted, very bombastic. Landry very quiet, reserved. Both were great teachers and great coaches.

When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature who was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.

I don’t know exactly what are you supposed to do when you retire. Lie on the couch and do nothing? I didn’t want to do that.

I just want people to finish the book and say, ‘I was entertained.’ When I set out to do it, I had no deal in place. I knew it would be tough. I read somewhere that John Steinbeck was turned down 22 times on his first novel. But I was just going to do it.

People sometimes ask me to name the greatest coach in NFL history. George Halas may have set the standard, but Don Shula has won more games than anyone, and he has done it in the most competitive era. He had an incomparable ability to evaluate players, to motivate them, and to teach them the game of football.

Chronological age is only an approximation of your functional age.

I went off to Harvard Law School for six weeks, and then I said, ‘Doggone this, it’s not what I want to do.’ I remember when I told my dad I was leaving law school, and I wanted to go into football. He said, ‘Be a good coach.’

If there’s age discrimination – and there may be – I’ve always felt that the person who discriminates is hurt more than the person being discriminated against, if the second person shucks it off and moves forward.

If you don’t change with the times, the times are going to change you.

I’m hoping to get started on a new novel.

I’ve always been entranced by writing.

If you start thinking of the Super Bowl championship as your motivation, you are going to miss the trees for the forest or the forest for the trees. I never could understand that one.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read – Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier – were rhyme poets. That’s what captured me.

I am going to miss Don Shula. I like him, and I admire him. I’m going to miss looking those 53 yards across the field and thinking, ‘There is a coaching legend.’

If you say you plan to retire in two or three years, you’ve already retired.

You adhere to a philosophy, but part of the philosophy I have is that I don’t want to be too doggone inflexible that I miss a good player.

Whenever I think of baseball, the first name that comes to mind is Babe Ruth. What the Babe was to baseball, Shula is to football coaching. There are certain figures in sports who are larger than the games they play or coach, and Don Shula is one of those.

My father Sam, by his lifelong example, displayed for me the virtues of an honest day’s work and of great personal courage.

I’m sure there were concussions galore back when we played, but the doctors would just say, ‘Shake it off,’ or something like that… or ‘Come on, you got to be tough… get back in there.’ I see so many guys who played pro football in their 50s now who are so debilitated from having played it.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote ‘The Sun Also Rises’ 39 times.

For a long time, I was an assistant in the NFL to George Allen, and George was paranoid that other teams were cheating on him… that they were offering bounties, that they were wiring our locker room, that they were putting food poisoning into the pregame meal of the other team’s stars, stuff like that.