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People talk about me being a firefighter, but I have also been very successful. It annoys me that in this country you get pigeon-holed for certain things.
You have different characters in the dressing room. If you have a go at someone, someone might answer back, other people will take it and speak afterwards.
Discipline and respect and hard work are not bad words. I expect that from everybody - especially the players who are in fortunate and very lucky positions.
The FA have to be careful in telling you what you can and cannot say. If they are telling you that you cannot tell the truth, then they are on sticky ground.
Everybody wants things now. If I hadn't been given the time at Stoke, or at other clubs earlier in my career, I don't think I would have ever been successful.
Every job I've had I feel lucky to have had. Of all the family, I was the lucky one. I've been very fortunate. I don't regret anything, I don't crave anything.
I always think the best players come from the areas where there are loads of chimney pots, where they have been brought up a little bit tougher than the others.
Players live a different life. They've been blessed. They live in a bubble and they live in a world where they get everything really. They've become film stars.
When I was a player, if you weren't in the team you would be knocking on the manager's door, saying, 'Well, if I can't play here, I'd like to play somewhere else.'
What really, really matters is the dressing room and the people on the training ground being very, very focused in what we are trying to achieve on and off the ball.
I have read loads of books on Napoleon. For him to come from nothing and then lead his country, that fascinated me. It doesn't matter what you think of him. He did it.
When you're young you say things you maybe regret, I have been there and I am sure every player has, you say something you wish you hadn't and you learn from these things.
My dad was a steelworker but I had the opportunity to become a player. A very average player but a player all the same. But I worked my socks off to make something of myself.
I watched Cardiff when I was a young boy. I also watched Newport. If I wasn't playing games on Saturday, for Newport YMCA or Pill, I would jump on a train and get to watch Cardiff.
Ever since I started professional football at 15 there was always that togetherness and solidarity in the dressing room - it is a sanctuary. When I started football everyone believed it.
I've come from a working class background in South Wales with eight of us in a three bedroom house. Four boys in one bed, two sisters in the other bedroom and mum and dad in the box room.
I think everybody has got to understand that you go into certain games, and they've got all the tools and the weapons to win a game of football and you're really trying to contend as much as anything else.
Age is just a number. For 18 months at Boro I was the first one in at training and one of the last out. I look at people like Manuel Pellegrini and Marcelo Bielsa and think they all have something to offer.
When you have seven grandchildren and you've been around them a while, they soften you up. But there's still that little streak in me that if I need to make sure something has to be done, then it gets done.
I can remember being at Gillingham playing in the fourth division ringing up other people I knew at clubs to see what team they would play, if they had injuries. Or you would ring a press man you knew in that area.
People go on about my style of play. But I tell you what I do - I go into football clubs, I try to find out what systems suit the players and I try to get the damnedest out of those players. That's what I've done everywhere I've been.
I enjoy the gym. I think if you're fit in your body, you're fit in your mind. So I get up most mornings and I'm first there usually. I stay in there for an hour, an hour and a half, do my work, shower and then I have a nice breakfast.
I knew the day I left Newport that if I came back, I'd failed. The fear of losing the game, of having to go home and tell my family, 'I tried but it didn't work out,' has haunted me. It is still there, and it is a strength and a weakness.
I've come from a fantastic, working class area and to actually have the fortune to be given that opportunity to get out of that has never left me. I was determined from the first day I left to make the most of it and that will never stop.
There is no point going man-to-man with a player of Messi's ability. He is so clever he would drag your player all over the pitch and still find a way to destroy you, probably exploiting the hole you've left by assigning someone to that role.
What frustrates me more than anything is that I push on so far and people become complacent, lose that bit of edge, and it's very difficult to keep driving people on. That's probably the greatest fault of mine: I expect everybody to be like me.
That's management. It's a social job as much as anything else, finding out what people are like, seeing through them. There have been good players and not-so-good players who I have moved along because I thought there would be a clash of character.
There are players like that - you know they have been rascals, and that you can bring them in, give them a new environment and get a length of time out of them, but they will always return to type. You can get something out of them, then you have to get rid of them.
The Premier League is a wonderful league, the best league in the world, and there are a lot of clubs who overachieve and they overachieve massively. Because of results they get pushed down instead of people scratching the surface and seeing what is really happening.
We know you have good runs and bad runs. The big thing you learn in the Premiership is you have to take it on the chin. You have learn how to lose without getting too down and too despondent. You have to box that up, put it to one side and make sure everyone who counts stays positive.
When we were at Stoke and we first got in to the Premier League we had been second in the Championship and were regular winners in that division. The following year we weren't regular winners, so you have to manage yourself and you have to be positive yourself you have to lift the players.
I always remember sitting with my son, Anthony, at Arsenal one night and watching Barcelona during the warm-up. Messi launched this ball miles into the air and then killed it dead with his foot when it came back down. Anthony and I just looked at each other. Normal human beings aren't capable of doing that.
I keep saying, and I've said it to the players, what happens in a dressing room stays in a dressing room, whether that's with me and a player, whether it's two players together, whether it's the coaching staff and the players. I just think it's almost a sacred environment and that trust in that area is unbreakable.
Social media is good in some ways, for me to Skype my son and grandchildren every day in America is wonderful. But then you've got other things on the Internet which are absolutely dreadful. It's poisonous and there should be greater control of that. You're not going to change it, though, so you have to work with it.
Someone asked me 'What's the biggest thing you'll take out of the Premier League?' I said that you can't relax. I think you can go from having a great run of games - you can go four, five, six unbeaten - and turn a corner and go into a run of seven or eight games without winning. That's how difficult it is for the so-called smaller clubs.