Top 30 Marv Levy Quotes

I’ve always been entranced by writing.

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

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.

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.

I don’t remember Bill Walsh being old. I remember young Bill Walsh. He wasn’t gray-haired, and neither was I when we first met. His legacy will live on. Bill Walsh’s name and his accomplishments will be remembered and revered so long as the great game of football is played.

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.

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.

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.

I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.

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

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.

Absolutely everything undergoes evolvement – whether it’s technology, journalism, the NFL, medicine.

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 have stayed active. I do keep moving. But I should start swimming more. Great exercise.

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.

Chronological age is only an approximation of your functional age.

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.

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.

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.

There’s three parts to football: offense, defense, and special teams. You’d no more ignore special teams than you would offense or defense.

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

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

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 consider myself a Chicagoan, and if anybody else does, that gratifies me.

I never have suspected or sensed a whiff of cheating in any of our Super Bowls.

Actually, I’m working on a book of poetry.

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.

The age factor means nothing to me. I’m old enough to know my limitations and I’m young enough to exceed them.

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.