My role is different than Freddie Blassie, the Grand Wizard, and Lou Albano's, and Bobby Heenan's, Jimmy Hart's and J.J. Dillon's as well. I legitimately consider myself Brock Lesnar's advocate. That's my primary purpose to serve to the WWE Universe.
— Paul Heyman
I always tell Brock Lesnar the truth. I don't appease Brock Lesnar. I don't placate Brock Lesnar. When Brock Lesnar asks me for an opinion, I give to him an honest opinion that I'm willing to back up with facts, with theory.
Madison Square Garden to any New York kid is the center of the universe. Even going there as a fan is like stepping up to the plate at Yankee Stadium. You know you're in the grand cathedral.
Like any compelling show on television, what works best in WWE is relationships. What's the relationship between these two people, and how does the conflict manifest itself into box office?
I was a huge fan of Raven because of the way he redefined how a champion should wrestle.
I think ECW itself was a gimmick. I think getting the audience to chant ECW was really something. I don't care if you draw 70,000 people in a dome for Wrestlemania - nobody chants WWE.
I grew up in a household with my mother, who was a Holocaust survivor. I very much understand the mentality that you cannot live in the past. You can't spend your entire life, or even portions of it, looking back and dwelling on things that have already happened. You have to move forward.
Unlike Frank Sinatra, I have no regrets in my life. Zero. Whatever hardships I have faced, or have caused myself, are moments I have to embrace in order to move forward. I have no problem coming to grips with either the highs or lows in my life.
I don't follow football, because it's predetermined.
I think that Dean Ambrose is driven to create a first-time-ever, unique character that other people in the future can be compared to.
No one goes to WrestleMania wanting to walk away goin,g 'Yeah, it was okay, but I thought last year's was better.'
The Dangerous Alliance consists of the following - 'The Advocate' Paul Heyman and 'The Beast' Brock Lesnar. That Dangerous Alliance is the single most formidable faction in the history of sports entertainment. We don't need Four Horsemen. We don't need three Freebirds. We don't need a Legion of Doom.
Ronda Rousey is a groundbreaker. She is one who charts through territory that has never been explored before and is one of the biggest sports stars in the world, male or female.
I'm not someone who concerns himself with whether people pay to cheer Roman Reigns or whether people pay to boo Roman Reigns. People pay to see Roman Reigns. They pay to react to Roman Reigns.
Kurt Angle is an Olympic gold medalist, one of the greatest in-ring performers of all-time.
If you look at who emerged on the horizon 12 to 18 months after ECW stopped running shows, I think it's very reasonable to believe that we would have picked up CM Punk and several of the other young stars that emerged in the independent scene in the early part of that decade. Punk obviously is the one that I would hope I would have noticed.
The whole concept of ECW was that the biggest star of the promotion was the promotion itself. It didn't matter if a persona was designed to elicit cheers or boos. It didn't matter if someone was an antagonist or protagonist. The whole concept was to fight for the honor of the cause. The cause was ECW itself.
I've always been of the opinion that great talent can't be held down.
I look at every promo I do as a command performance to do better than I did the previous week if not deliver the best promo of my life.
My first memory of the Garden, it's probably like any other kid in New York: it's either watching the Knicks win the championship or Muhammed Ali against Joe Frazier.
My off-camera friendship with Brock Lesnar has always been different than my off-camera friendship with CM Punk. But I could not tell you that I am closer to either one of them or either one of them is closer to me. It's just a different relationship.
Who can deny that it was a pleasure to watch Rob Van Dam interact with the audience and tear the house down for 30 minutes a night.
I've never walked through the curtain with someone I wasn't trying to audition as a WrestleMania main-eventer, and I never want to.
I don't want to be one of these guys who sits in a room watching old footage of himself, reliving old glory. It's just not me. I want to create new adventures. I'm not trying to live vicariously through my own past.
You wouldn't have thought Paul Heyman and CM Punk would have been so effective with the WWE Title, but we were because we understood our roles to each and the audience.
I think you should start the first 90 minutes of Raw with a Paul Heyman promo and the second 90 minutes of Raw with Brock Lesnar wiping out the entire roster. But then again, that's my vision for Monday Night Raw.
I haven't wanted to portray a manager since Paul E. Dangerously was with the Samoan Swat Team in 1989. I've always wanted to do some different presentation in that role. I don't consider myself a manager - I'm an advocate, and I truly believe that that is the description for the role that I play.
If your heart's not pumping premium on WrestleMania Sunday, then I don't understand what you're doing at WrestleMania.
Brock Lesnar is an extraordinary, underrated forward thinker. Every day of Brock's life, he is smarter than he was the day before.
Ronda Rousey is a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, and anything that Ronda Rousey does is going to come with extreme scrutiny because she is such a pivotal figure in not only American sports but in global sports as well.
Goldberg was as close to a cultural icon as WCW ever produced.
Triple H is one of the greatest in-ring performers of all-time.
Shane Douglas accomplished quite a bit in and for ECW, but his career will forever be defined by the moment he threw down the NWA Title.
Shane Douglas's work in the first 11 months as The Franchise of ECW was so groundbreaking. He made people forget about his on-air persona in WCW and successfully reinvented himself as The Franchise in ECW.
I don't think anyone realizes how much Bray Wyatt has to offer.
Working with Brock Lesnar is a daily challenge because every Monday night that we're on television, I feel compelled to deliver, at least from my end, the best performance I've ever put on.
Brock Lesnar and I are as different as any two people can be. What drew us together was the love of the actual performance aspect of what we do.
Roles constantly have to be redefined in any form of entertainment. Look back at the gangster pics of the 1930s and 1940s and the way James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart would play the part. These roles were redefined in the 1970s by Al Pacino and Rober DeNiro. And again in the 1990s by Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.
I was a huge fan of Shane Douglas and how he used the microphone during a match.
The audience wants something that entertains them, and whether that entertainment is in the form of a physical match or in the form of a skit or video or promo, it's our job to deliver it to them, to the point where the audience becomes the biggest champion of our brand. And if we can't match that, then we're falling short.
I hate watching myself because when I watch anything I've ever done, I realize all the ways I could have done it better.
Brock Lesnar and I have a very unique chemistry. It works. It's worked since 2002; it will continue to work any time we are presented together.
I don't think you can ever tell the story of Ted Turner's involvement in professional wrestling-slash-sports entertainment without devoting several chapters to the rise and continued ascent of Sting.
WrestleMania is an experience. It's an overall ride, its ups and its downs and its curves and its music. It's presentation, and it's emotion, and it's paying tribute to the past and progressing the product into the future. It's career-defining moments for people who live for career-defining moments.
I truly am of the belief that I should be nominated and elected 'Emperor of North America' and given a shot at being ruler of the universe, and I haven't had the chance to craft my campaigns for these offices yet because I've been very busy with Brock Lesnar.
I dearly believe in my heart that Goldberg is a family man who has a profound love for his wife and son and wants his family to see him as that superhero that people romanticize him being during the height of his fame.
I don't think anything Ronda Rousey does is going to be the norm. I think everything she does is going to set a new trend and blaze a new trail.
Goldberg is authentic. What you see is what you get, and he's a wrecking machine.
I never envisioned multimillion-dollar offices for ECW.
People are remembered for defining moments in their career.
