“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.”

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.

The only important statistic is the final score.

Commitment separates those who live their dreams from those who live their lives regretting the opportunities they have squandered.

Success is a result of consistent practice of winning skills and actions. There is nothing miraculous about the process. There is no luck involved.

What’s more important than who’s going to be the first black manager is who’s going to be the first black sports editor of the New York Times.

I fall in love every time. And I don’t really fall in love a lot, but when I do, I fall hard.

I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.

It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

And sometimes places can be hard to say goodbye too than people.

It’s hard when all you want is the sky, chasing after the hues of pinks and blues, feeling that for once you’ve got a grip on clouds that swoosh through storms of your own. But it’s worse when you ask for the sun and receiving the soil stuck to your feet.

No matter how hard these waves crash they will not break me.