“The last five or six days, I’ve been running. The last two days, I’ve been running pretty hard. Everybody’s got to be someplace.”

Durability is part of what makes a great athlete.

On females officiating in the NBA -Incompetence should not be confined to one sex.

You can do anything you want to do if you want it bad enough.

Friendship is a full-time job.

If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it’s not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.

The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.

My father once told me that anyone who worked for three dollars an hour owed it to himself to put in four dollars’ worth of work.

If you really have integrity, there are very few people who can insult you, or honor you.

Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory.

Heart in champions has to do with the depth of our motivation and how well your mind and body react to pressure – that is, being able to do what you do best under maximum pain and stress.

We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us-anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.

The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.

My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.

Don’t knock the ball in the stands, keep it in your hands!

If you can take something to levels that very few other people can reach, then what you’re doing becomes art.

To me, the most important part of winning is joy. You can win without joy, but winning that’s joyless is like eating in a four-star restaurant when you’re not hungry. Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight, that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.

Don’t give up! Be friends with people who help you work hard.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?

It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.

That the machine of Heaven is not a hard and impervious body full of various real spheres, as up to now has been believed by most people.

I’m far from being god, but I work god damn hard.

The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?