The following are highlights of Bret Hart's new interview with Newsday's Alfonso Castillo.

On the difficulty of listening to entries from his audio journal in preparation of his book:

"Sometimes it was very heartbreaking to relive a lot of that stuff. The tapes - not just with Owen - but to Benoit and to my other brother-in-law, The Bulldog. There were so many little memories and little details that came out from those tapes. And my own reflections from my marriage and my relationship with Vince McMahon. I know how much I was dedicated to him and to the company and how grateful for everything they did for me and how they put me on a kind of pedestal as the champion. When I listen to the tapes back, I realize that I always knew Vince, right from day one - even from my father - that he was a pretty slippery snake all along. There were no illusions."

On writing the definitive account of the Montreal incident:

"I wanted them to at least look and put themselves in my shoes and put themselves in the dressing room and asked themselves if they had been me, what would they have done? Would they have had - for the lack of a better word - would they have had the b___s to get up and knock him out? To stand up and do something about it? I could sense that day that it was kind of like everybody, or a lot of people, would have expected me to just blow it off and maybe say a few words to him and tell him he was a real jerk or something like that - slam the door and walk out. I think that's what Vince was looking for. That's all anybody ever does. Everyone is so job scared. But for me it was different. I grew up with wrestling, like Vince did. It was my whole life, and my whole family had given so much for the industry. And I thought about how much it would hurt my father at home and my kids were watching. I thought what I did and how I handled things was a defining moment for me and my character - not my wrestling character, but my own character as a human being. I always thought it was the best thing I ever did."

On Ric Flair:

"People always talk about who the best wrestlers are. I actually go to maybe too much of an explanation about someone like Ric Flair for example. They rave about Ric Flair about being this great, great wrestler. And he was a great wrestler in many ways. But, in a lot of ways, like working with him in the ring, he was not so great. And for someone to contest that with me or argue with me that I don't know what I'm talking about, things like that drive me crazy. Because it's not true. They don't know what they're talking about. I know. I've worked with some of the greatest wrestlers of all time."

On the recent controversy in which he walked out of a wrestling banquet:

"They were giving these guys an award for their books that they had been writing. I was so annoyed by the books that they had been writing because they were just made up. It was just some guy that didn't know anything about wrestling that was making up whatever he thought. He was just a fan that had declared himself as an expert. And he was being cited that night as an expert and a guy that everybody appreciated what he contributed. And I thought, 'He contributes nothing. He doesn't even tell the truth.' And that's what that was all about. It really wasn't even worth my time to make a big issue of it."

On what makes a wrestler "great":

"I think the only ones that know who the real great wrestlers are are the great wrestlers. And I don't think anybody else knows. I don't think Dave Meltzer knows. I think he tries to know. What I like about Dave Meltzer is that he tries to get it right. There's a sense of integrity there. He's not making it up. He's trying to get it right."

On getting his big WWE run during a bad business period:

"Wrestling had this huge surge with Hulk Hogan. He made such a huge impact on everything. When he started to kind of slip and fall and wrestling was taking a lot of shots for the steroids and Vince and Hogan, and that sex scandal with the ring crew. There were a lot of really tough things that had nothing to do with me. And the company was in a tough spot. And I've always been kind of flattered that they called on me to sort of pull the sword out of the stone. And I did. I think I wasn't the biggest draw in the world, but I stopped things from sinking. They didn't go down any further after that."

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Keller's Analysis: Bret's comments on wrestling historian Greg Oliver are particularly disturbing. Bret is an asshole when it comes to this situation. He didn't like where Oliver had ranked him in a book a couple decades ago in terms of where Bret ranked compared to other Canadians and he held the grudge all these years about it. Oliver has gone on to be one of the better historians of this generation, and for Bret to demean him today is sad and unbecoming and shows what a petty person he remains after all of these years, perhaps with a veneer stripped away due to his health problems that doesn't change who he always was, but merely reveals it in a more unfiltered way.

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