“Larry Bird is overrated in a lot of areas. … Why does he get so much publicity? Because he’s white. You never hear about a black player being the greatest.”

The only time I’d played organized basketball was my sophomore year in high school, when I barely made the junior varsity team.

I spent my whole childhood looking for an escape.

I wear women’s leggings under my clothes, but no lingerie.

If you’re going to have sex, use a condom.

I understand what rappers are talking about. I think rap is less about educating people about the black community and more about making money.

Keeping us safe is really not my job; it’s the black guy’s [Obama’s] job. But I’ll tell you this: If I don’t finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something’s seriously wrong.

I’m trying to find new ways to make this game more attractive.

If I die young, everybody’s going to say they saw it coming.

People are threatened by me. Rich white, rich blacks, it doesn’t matter.

Karl Malone’s too high-class for a bum like me.

Music soothes my savage beast. I got a beast in me running wild.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

There’s one thing everyone should understand: I like my character.

Wilt Chamberlain lied when he said he had 20,000 women.

When a high-profile personality lives like I do, everybody thinks that person is fated to die young.

When they gave me that trophy, bro, I cried.

I’ve been successful in different areas, but nothing brings a smile to my face more than my oldest son, Zaire, and my second son, Zion, saying the kind word of ‘Dad.’

There’s always going to be pressure, and there’s always going to be an area where you disappoint. As a storyteller, you have to understand that.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

I’m a basketball player. That’s what I do and what I love but that’s just not all who I am. I’m talented in a lot of different areas.

The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused back into space from the land and water-covered areas.

To an observer situated on the moon or on one of the planets, the most noticeable feature on the surface of our globe would no doubt be the large areas covered by oceanic water.

We have taken the manatees out of the areas in the Caribbean and really elsewhere in the world, and this disruption to the system makes such systems vulnerable to changes as they come by, whether it’s in terms of disease or terms or global warming for that matter.