When I left Portsmouth, I was happy. I'd had a great two years there, but I wanted a break. I needed a break.

Southampton is my last job. I might have said it before, but this time, I really mean it.

There're plenty of good people in football - mostly players and managers.

Football wears you out, and when things are not going well, it's not enjoyable.

At West Ham, I was never able to buy the top-flight players. It was a case of looking around, trying to do deals. I was always taking a gamble.

I've enjoyed my time at every club I have worked at, I've been lucky, but I won't jump in and finish up working with a chairman I didn't like very much.

When I was a player, you only left the club if they wanted to get rid of you. That was your team - if you were at West Ham, you didn't leave until the manager wanted to replace you. You didn't think about playing for Arsenal or Chelsea.

You now have these owners who are all successful businessmen, and they think they should be winning. They come in thinking that they should be winning. Some don't understand that only one team can win the league.

I am not a tax fiddler. I am not any kind of tax fiddler, never have been in my life.

You shouldn't be paying massive wages when you've got a stadium that holds 18,000 people.

I've got no hobbies - a game of golf every now and again, but that's it.

I don't go to Cheltenham. Too busy. It does my head in.

If there is anybody who feels they are not in the right frame of mind to play, then obviously, I would not play them.

I have been around football all my life, and it doesn't happen. It never enters my mind. I don't think, 'Oh, what's going to happen to me at the end of the season?' Whatever happens to me, happens.

The players don't sit in there and think, 'We have to make the Champions League.' They want to play well in every game.

I am a fantastic football manager, not a hard-headed businessman.

I've got no business acumen whatsoever.

I don't write. I couldn't even fill a team sheet in.

I can't write - I don't even know how to punctuate.

I went to the worst school you've ever seen.

I don't know what goes on in prison. I've never been in trouble with the police in my life.

I could write a book - if I could write, ha ha - about how many times I've been ripped off lending money to people. I'm an absolutely unbelievable soft touch. Unbelievable. I never learn my lesson.

I'm useless around the house.

I do wonder how managers like Brian Clough and Bill Shankly would cope. How would Cloughie deal with players taking five pairs of different colour boots to a game?

If you buy too many bad players, you don't last in this game.

I feed foxes. I'm not supposed to, but I love it.

I just thought Spurs were a challenge that I had to take on.

Down at Bournemouth, I kicked a tray of cups up into air, and one hit Luther Blissett on the head. He flicked it on, and it went all over my suit hanging behind. Another time, at West Ham, I also threw a plate of sandwiches at Don Hutchison. He's sitting there, still arguing with me, with cheese and tomato running down his face.

I am a worrier.

People think I'm all calm, but underneath I'm not.

I don't live my life feeling bitter about anything. I've been so lucky. I've had such a great life.

I've been around a long time. I've seen it all before.

The fans pay good money to watch their team, so they are entitled to their opinion.

No one is more of a fan of the game than me: my son is a player.

Lionel Messi reminds me of George Best, the way he would run with the ball tight to his foot.

I remember the terrible winter in 1963, clearing the snow off the forecourt at Upton Park with the rest of the players so we could train. Job done, we'd play on it for two hours in silly little plimsolls, sliding everywhere.

I was fortunate to spend the Sixties working for one of the greatest football minds this country has ever produced: Ron Greenwood.

There is some right old rubbish talked about Gareth Bale's time with me at Tottenham. Was I ever going to sell Bale? No. Was I going to loan him? No.

Whatever faults I may have, I do know a player.

After my heart operation, I was given tablets, but, I'll admit, half the time I forget to take them. I carry them around in the car. Little triangular things - I don't know what they are, to be honest.

Losing produces a weird reaction in me. I surrender all sense of perspective. It's ridiculous, really. All this over a football match.

Scholes was playing tiki-taka football when nobody in England knew what it was. He was another of those players, like Denis Law or Bobby Moore, who at 15 probably looked as if he wouldn't make it.

Despite all that has happened in his career since, one of the biggest regrets of my life in management is not taking Luis Suarez to Tottenham when we had the chance.

On the night of June 30, 1990, a minibus in which I was travelling was involved in a head-on collision on a road near Latina, in the region of Lazio, near Rome.

When I was a kid, all our seaside holidays were spent on Canvey Island or in Clacton-on-Sea.

In the Fifties, Canvey was a top seaside place for a youngster - the famous Canvey Island Casino was full of slot machines and there were all the fairground rides, such as the dodgems, and a speedway track.

My mum and dad never went abroad for a holiday. My dad was overseas in the war but never thought about going anywhere like the Mediterranean after that, so my mum died without ever having been on a plane or abroad.

I never went overseas until I left school and joined West Ham United Football Club at the beginning of the Sixties.

Ryan Giggs just had an athlete's physique. He could run all day.

The arrival of Arsene Wenger in 1996 certainly heralded a change in English football. He was very successful very quickly, and suddenly, all the talk was about his revolutionary new training methods.