“I failed, I think, seven [or] eight times before I finally got my first [championship]. It was just, you know, just about me growing up.”

Being here feels like I’m out of prison. This is the right place, the right time, the right team.

Stats don’t matter. I care about winning, not stats. If I score 0 points and we win I’m happy. If I score 50, 60 points, break the records, and we lose.

As my great friend Aristotle said, ‘If you cannot command, you must learn to listen.’ I’m not the hierarchy here. I am a worker bee.

But that is the only thing that slows me down is the system. No one, two or three was big enough to slow me down, only the system. It was the system that slowed me down to make my numbers fall. Not because I am older.

I don’t get tired. I get beat up. You keep chopping on a tree, you need to give the tree some rest so the chlorophyll will fill back up and the tree gets its energy back.

Probably a lack of concentration. I always hit them during practice. I just need to concentrate. Even though I should a lousy percentage,

I’m ready to go. As big men in the league, there are two who have done something special during this millennium. I’m one and Tim Duncan is the other.

The biggest thing that will define my legacy is how I’ve done it, and what I’ve done, and who I am. I’m a weird big guy. Doing rapping, doing movies.

I don’t know who made it, all I know is it was put in my head that two plus two is four. So certain things happen. Why does it rain? Why am I so sexy? I don’t know.

Talk to the guys that ain’t doing nothing, don’t talk to me. I just want eight guys out there with me who want to play.

Because I grew up with a drill sergeant in my life,

Now that I’m an old, old veteran-age 29-I do things a lot differently. I don’t go to the gentlemen’s clubs anymore. I had to slow that down.

There’s no answer for my offense, just like the polythagorean theorem.

My wrists are crooked and don’t go all the way back. I’ve been practicing and working on them. You can’t do everything good.

I don’t know how it is for you earthlings, but where I’m from, strength is mental.

Get away from my house. What do you want?

But coming home that day, walking downhill with a panorama of valley and hills before me, I turned my gaze inward, and what I saw, stopped me in my tracks.

Sometimes bad things have to happen before good things can.

Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion.

No beer before 5 p.m., wait… did I just say that?

How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts?

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime.

There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.

Students, when you want to say something, think about it three times before you say it. Speak only if your words will benefit yourselves and others. Do not speak if it brings no benefit.