“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.”

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.

I don’t want to just go to the playoffs, I don’t want to go to the playoffs and win the first round, second round, and not win the whole thing because it’s bittersweet.

Everybody talks about that one when they first meet me. ‘Man, I still remember the play you shook Jordan.’ Everybody gonna always remember it because it was Jordan.

I’ve accomplished so many things in basketball. I financially secured my kids’ life and their future. I’m just happy. I’m just blessed. So anything that I’m not awarded doesn’t matter because I’ve been rewarded enough in this lifetime.

People and what they say don’t bother me like they used to. When I was younger, I really couldn’t take it because I couldn’t understand where the criticism was coming from.

If that many people recognize how hard I go every night and what I put into my game, to make myself and my team better, it means a lot to me. I’m fortunate; I’m blessed to be in the situation that I’m in right now.

I wanted my fans and my family and my friends to be proud of me.

You don’t want to hear about how much money I donate to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America or to AIDS awareness or to give out scholarships. You don’t want to hear about that.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

I take a cooking class everywhere I travel. I find it’s the best way to get to know a culture.

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.