“I’m mainstream. Always have been.”

Life is about growth. People are not perfect when they’re 21 years old.

The joy, the optimism, the teamwork, the experimentation, the exploration, the curiosity. No band has inspired more artwork, no band has inspired more books. No band has ever inspired a more loyal following and I’m involved in all of that stuff.

That’s what I tried to share in this book, Back From The Dead, the ability to learn, to dream, to hope. In a world that is far too often selling fear and death, I’m selling hope and life and success and that’s why I chose to be part of the Grateful Dead.

In basketball, you can be the greatest individual player in the world and still lose every game, because a team will always beat an individual.

During the course of my life, Grateful Dead played all the time. There were constantly concerts you could go to.

Being a broadcaster encompasses the business of sport, which is my life today, and it encompasses the skills of being a history student, and the ability of being a performer.

No one missed more basketball in the history of NBA than I did. I played 14 seasons, on the roster for 14 years, and I missed more than nine-and-a-half full seasons.

Winning is about having the whole team on the same page.

There are four pillars to happiness, which is the ultimate goal in life-to be happy. Health is first, family is second, home is third. That safe place where you can go to and regroup, be in a safe place by yourself start over.

I love to play music. I’m terrible at it, but I love learning about it .

I lived to play basketball. Growing up as a kid, Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics were my favorite team. The way they played, the teamwork, the sacrifice, the commitment, the joy, the camaraderie, the relationship with the fans.

I’m a different person today than I was yesterday. I live for the moment and everything that happens in my life changes me.

Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana. So many of them are still around and still going strong. I go out to see them all the time.

When I think of Boris Diaw, I think of Beethoven in the age of the romantics

When I’m at a show, I’m yelling and cheering. I’m with those guys [the Grateful Dead].

My life changed irrevocably four-and-a-half years ago when my spine failed and collapsed. I spent two years on the floor, in excruciating, debilitating and unrelenting pain.

I love the way I make hip-hop and I refuse to make pop-rap. I don’t refuse to make mainstream music, which is why I did a soul record. There was no reason why soul music couldn’t get played on the radio and I still wanted to have a relationship with my record label.

Hip-hop artists, especially the older ones, are the ones who knew hip-hop was a worldwide phenomenon before the mainstream caught on, so hip-hop artists are forward thinkers. We want to stay with the new.

Now, the political class tries to make sense of all of this, but they can’t, because never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today.

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:

I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like thats because technology has caught up with us.

And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus. It’s – I think they might use too much oil in their hummus – but it’s the wrong question.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe.