Meaning

This remark is a cheerful admission that the sheer number of witty, contradictory, or absurd things credited to Yogi Berra had grown far beyond anything he actually said. It winks at the paradox built into the sentence itself: the moment you claim you never said most of your quotes, you are adding another quote to the pile. The line captures the strange way that a public personality can become a legend larger than the real person, with words attached to the name like barnacles.

Context

Berra became one of the most quoted figures in American sports culture, and journalists, fans, and comedians eagerly attributed clever or nonsensical sayings to him whether he originated them or not. Some of his famous lines were genuine, others were misattributed, and still others grew distorted in retelling. This quote is his own ironic acknowledgment of that phenomenon. It is self-aware humor from a man who understood that his reputation for colorful speech had taken on a life of its own, and he seemed to enjoy the joke rather than resent it.

About the author

Yogi Berra was a celebrated American baseball player and manager whose career centered on the New York Yankees during their most dominant mid-twentieth-century era. A multiple World Series champion, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and earned a reputation both as one of the finest catchers in the history of the sport and as an endlessly quotable personality whose offbeat observations, known as Yogi-isms, became a permanent part of American popular culture.