PATRICK SWAYZE

You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.

I don't know how many hills and valleys I've had, how many times I've had to refocus my world and my life and my career.

There are people who want me to do a cologne. They want to call it 'Patrick.' I was offered a fortune to make exercise videos. Posters, all kinds of stuff - something like $10 million worth. It's insanity. I'm not going to do any of it.

I'm trying to shut up and let my angels speak to me and tell me what I'm supposed to do.

When you are a pit bull, and you love what you do and you are going to continue to grow, that talent will find its way out.

I dropped about 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. And then when you see it in the mirror, when all of a sudden you pull your eyes down, and the bottom of your eyes go yellow and jaundice sets in - then you know something's wrong.

I like to believe that I've got a lot of guardian warriors sittin' on my shoulder including my dad.

I wanna live.

What winning is to me is not giving up, is no matter what's thrown at me, I can take it. And I can keep going.

There's just something about dance. It's like a primal thing in all of us.

As always, I appreciate all the love and support people have sent and continue to send my way.

One thing I'm not going to do is chase staying alive. You spend so much time chasing staying alive, you won't live.

I've never been one to run from a challenge.

I took after my father.

What's powerful about a love scene is not seeing the act. It's seeing the passion, the need, the desire, the caring, the fear.

Everything is designed to help you sell out.

You can't be pregnant in leotards, and this is the last chance for us to get our bodies into the shape of concert dancers and capture it with the magic of film.

I got completely fed up with that Hollywood blockbuster mentality. I couldn't take it seriously any longer.

I will go so far as to say probably smoking had something to do with my pancreatic cancer.

Sometimes a movie encapsulates a period or a moment in all of our lives in such a way that it never dies.

When people are away from home, they do things they might not normally do.

I don't know what's on the other side.

How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you're a dead man? You go to work.

I've had so many injuries.

I am very, very clear on how difficult it is for a young kid out there to go into the arts without taking a lot of heat from his peers.