“To me, the most important part of winning is joy. You can win without joy, but winning that’s joyless is like eating in a four-star restaurant when you’re not hungry. Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight, that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.”

We couldn’t sustain it. And they got a lot of kids that can shoot. We just couldn’t close out well enough.

The magic to a great meeting is all of the work that’s done beforehand.

The most important thing to me is the friends that I’ve made.

Durability is part of what makes a great athlete.

On females officiating in the NBA -Incompetence should not be confined to one sex.

You can do anything you want to do if you want it bad enough.

Friendship is a full-time job.

If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it’s not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.

The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.

My father once told me that anyone who worked for three dollars an hour owed it to himself to put in four dollars’ worth of work.

If you really have integrity, there are very few people who can insult you, or honor you.

Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory.

Heart in champions has to do with the depth of our motivation and how well your mind and body react to pressure – that is, being able to do what you do best under maximum pain and stress.

We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us-anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.

The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.

My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.

One thing I’ve never said in my whole life is, ‘Let’s have dinner at a Japanese restaurant.’

I’ve been a lot of places, and my wife, Denise, she likes a lot of the fancy restaurants.

There are three days that are really slow for restaurants – Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

Everyone talks about Spanish influences, but where is it?…Tell me 10 great Spanish restaurants in London….You can’t give me the addresses. Nor in Paris.

When [Julia Marie Pacino] was 5 or 6 years old, we were in an Italian restaurant, and these people came by the table and they would start talking to me, asking me for my autograph and she just went under the table.

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare – at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It’s like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It’s great therapy.

I went into a restaurant one night and ordered lobster, and the waiter brought me one with a claw missing.

Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money.