“Omnipresence can be a good or bad thing, I suppose. I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’m super-grateful.”

I really do know football.

I grew up on the back of a motorcycle – my dad didn’t have a car until I was a teenager. And then my closest friend from grade school was a guy.

After going through a lot of procedures and spending a lot of money … the doctor said, ‘Look, based on what we’re seeing here, I just don’t think this is going to happen for you.’

You can only really learn from failure … To win, you need to fail, and fail hard.

I love it when I come across a word I don’t know. And I would never treat my audience like they weren’t smart enough to come along with me.

So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

I liked comedy, but didn’t know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney.

I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don’t tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.

When I was young I thought, ‘Yeah, people don’t see, they’re not recognizing how funny I am, and how talented I am’. And the guys that mentored me were like, ‘

I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to Talk Soup, where I was writing and performing for TV.

So I think the longer you do stand-up, the more comfortable you are. You stop wanting to hide your foibles and instead want to show who you are.

I will say that stand-up is my first love; it’s how I got started and is in my bones.

Pop culture is great, but it can be bad, at times.

I like to be nice. I want to be a hero. I want to save people. Or just kill zombies, because they deserve it, because they’re already dead and they can’t feel it. They don’t have feelings.

I always wanted to be as busy as possible so that if one job went away I’d still have plenty of other things to do.

Comedy is ugly. It’s honest, it’s raw.

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.

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

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

I’m a fan and a friend, I met them in 1974 when I first joined the NBA and my life has never been he same since. I became the basketball player I was because of the Grateful Dead.

[Peter] Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” was my first go-to song in terms of getting into the zone and getting ready and then I quickly gravitated to rock and roll music in the mid-’60s with the Grateful Dead,

Everybody asks me, ‘So, what are you doing now?’ Why must I be doing something? All my life I’ve been doing something.

We should feel grateful instead of entitled. We have a moral obligation to give back.

I like a lot of other music and listen to a lot of other music, but one of the greatest things about the Grateful Dead is they played all the time.