“I didn’t take constructive criticism the way I should have. When I finally caught up to that, that’s when I went to being the MVP.”

At times, I might have been too young; I might have been too naive at times and didn’t understand who I really was to a whole culture.

Everybody is their own person.

I am sick of defending myself, and I am not going to keep on doing it.

If we lose games, and I don’t score a lot, they gonna say I’m not scoring enough.

Being older, I can’t imagine a parent not wanting to be in their kid’s life. I will just never understand it. To me, it’s priceless.

If I’m not getting older and more mature at 31, then something’s wrong.

I knew I was gonna be the number one pick, but I didn’t know.

I gave everything I had to basketball. The passion is still there, but the desire to play is not. It was a great ride.

My dream was bigger than anything else. My fight and me wanting to fulfill what I wanted to be in life. That was enough to keep me strong enough to endure anything.

When you are not practicing, someone else is getting better.

Just understand that there’s going to be some ups, there’s going to be some downs.

Being in a fishbowl, everybody looking at every move you make, talking about everything you do – it’s just a hard life to live.

I surround myself with people who make me laugh.

Sometimes it used to hurt so bad when people used to say stuff about me. It still does. But I’m at a level now that I’m like, ‘I ain’t surprised that they said this or that about me.’

All my tattoos are tattoos that I wanted to get, but I couldn’t afford.

As far as how I expressed ‘practice, practice, practice’ over and over again, I wouldn’t take that back because, obviously, that sound bite is great for the media and for the fans, because they love it.

Yes, there are constraints on the way the insiders use their power. There are ‘checks and balances,’ built into the constitution, for example.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

Indeed there are powers in the small child that are far greater than is generally realized, because it is in this period that the construction, the building-up, of man takes place, for at birth, psychically speaking, there is nothing at all – zero!

The Exxon Valdez spill triggered a swift and strong response that changed policies about shipping, about double-hulled construction. A number of laws came into place.

I used to love it when I walked down the street and construction workers would whistle.