Dustin Poirier
I need to celebrate life because I'm in a good spot, I work hard, and I am happy with who I am and happy with what I do for a living, and sometimes I just focus and overwhelm myself so much with the fights and getting better, that I just need to slow it down and enjoy life and enjoy training.Collection: Work
I feel like I've always been a great fighter but I'm learning the patience part of it and not getting overwhelmed with emotion and adrenaline and going out there and brawling like a maniac.Collection: Patience
I want to fight guys I'm excited to watch fight.
All weight cuts are hard.
The champs are the guys who can do it the best, to lock it in for 25 minutes and do what they plan to do.
I have a pretty high fight IQ.
Just because I haven't fought wrestlers doesn't mean I'm not wrestling in every camp.
I'm not a frontrunner. I'm a complete fighter.
I just want fights like that. Fights that get me excited. Fights that are going to be exciting.
I'm familiar with adversity.
If I would have thought like fans think, I'd be broke and brain dead and fighting everybody every weekend.
Norman Parke needs to stay off of Twitter before he gets himself in a fight he can't win.
This is a business. I'm a professional athlete. This isn't, 'poke somebody and start a street fight.'
This isn't a Toughman competition; you don't just fight everybody because they want to fight.
Korean Zombie beat me, and I was prepared that night. He beat me, he beat me that night.
You have to be tough. All these guys are tough. But at some point, you have to outsmart and outhink and outplan these top fighters.
I was a born fighter before I got technical, and that's still in me.
I don't usually talk crap about guys.
I have mouths to feed and I want big fights!
If you move in and out, throw shots and use angles and the guy's feet are planted, you look a lot better.
My goal is to prosper and be a world champion and make money and retire and say I did it.
I feel like my wrestling and jiu-jitsu is so underrated.
Years and years ago, like in 2006, my wife, I didn't have a car, she would drive me to weigh-ins, we would sleep in broken-down motels and I would fight the next day. Just me and her.
I'm never going to go down to 145 again.
I don't see myself ever going up to 170.
When your body quits on you, it doesn't matter how mentally tough you are.
Nothing in my life was ever easy.
I really work hard to stay in great shape and make weight.
I want a rematch with Cub Swanson, I think I deserve to be 100 percent and fight.
I want the title. But these hands are working hands, and sometimes you've got to get them dirty.
The side of town, the side of Louisiana that I grew up on, there's a lot of poverty.
I never took the easy route.
I've always fought the best guys.
I've never pulled out of a fight. I've never missed weight.
Every fight, every camp I learn about myself and I get better. But every fight I get better.
I try to work on the small things.
I feel like I can submit Khabib, but feel like I'm going to stop him. I don't know how it's going to happen, but I'm either going to knock him out or I'm going to submit him. I'm going to finish Khabib Nurmagomedov.
I want to entertain the fans and put on great fights and have 'Fight of the Nights' and have exiting matchups, but at the same time I want to be the undisputed world champion.
I don't want to have an asterisk next to my accomplishments for the rest of my life. I don't want everybody to say, 'interim champ' every time someone says Dustin was the champion.
Of course, every time I get beat out there, I want to avenge those losses. I'm sure every fighter does.
Grit, determination, the right amount of crazy, self belief - everything it takes to be a champion. I have that.
Destiny doesn't make mistakes.
Adversity teaches a man a lot about himself.
Everybody has their own path. Everybody peaks at different times.
Win or lose or draw, you always go back and critique your performance and say you could have done things better. Even if I put the guy away in one round, I can go back and say I made a lot of mistakes and need to tighten up. But that's the type of person I am. Improve. Improve. Improve. When I lose I come back stronger than ever.
My father was a fighter. My grandfather was a fighter. It's just in my blood.
My goal and path is always to get to the mountaintop and be a world champion, and leave a fighting legacy.
Winning solves everything.
They had to re-shape the head of my femur back round. They had to trim my hip socket up a little bit. I had a lot of extra bone growth just from years of stressing it out. Because of that bone growth, it caused an impingement in my hip, which tore my labrum off the bone.
It's MMA. Anything can happen. Nothing's for sure.