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It's a hard life as a professional cricketer. It's not as easy as everyone makes out. To survive you need a tough hide.

Apart from being celebrities, there's a huge amount of respect associated with being cricketers and a certain amount of reverence and honour associated with representing India. In people's eyes, apart from other celebrities in India, I think for sportsmen in India there's a certain amount of regard.

I moved to cricket at a time when I was at the peak of my career, and I can guarantee you that no one else from Bollywood would have done that.

I think that part of the difficulty of being a celebrity is that you may have to hide what you're feeling and you aren't totally allowed to be yourself, because you're in the public eye.

I wanted to be a cricketer. But I was not skilled enough to be a national-level cricketer.

I think it's real easy to be famous these days; it's not real easy to sustain success.

I don't think I would have made it as a cricketer.

The toughest thing about being a celebrity, I suppose, is being polite when I don't want to be.