“If winning weren’t important nobody would keep score.”

I just can’t recruit where there’s grass around.

They call me eccentric. They used to call me nuts. I haven’t changed.

I’m not saying that they were Einsteins; they were marginal students. But every ballplayer whoever touched me has moved up his station in life. And the players moved up my station.

Dean Meminger was quicker than 11:15 Mass at a seaside resort.

It’s a profession in which, the longer you stay, the closer you are to being fired.

Butch, you come from DeWitt Clinton. There are five thousand brothers in that school.

A box score does not properly represent the most important thing – team play. It shows some guy scoring 27 points, but it doesn’t show that my 27-point man let his guy score 30.

A team should be an extension of a coach’s personality. My teams are arrogant and obnoxious.

Most people zero in on their failures. I try to keep all my attention on a pyramid type philosophy rather than the averaging-down philosophy.

I don’t know why people question the academic training of an athlete.

You’re the best there. You’ve been all-city two years in a row. How bad can you be? You come with me and we’ll make nice music.

My rule was I wouldn’t recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house.

Live every day as if it were Saturday night.

I’m an Einstein of the streets and an Oxford scholar of common sense.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin.

Every day I’m getting shaped and molded. Keepin’ on, being a better artist, and improving on this, improving on that.

I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it.

When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

I be chillin’. It feels good to know I got it, but it feel better to know I’ma keep it too.

I listen to my mother, and that keeps me out of trouble. I’m a good son.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.