“I respect that you want to protect your niece. You know, I didn’t want my daughter to become a boxer. Neither did Mohammad. But Joe Frazier, on the other hand, he had his baby girl boxing in the crib.”

I’ve seen George Foreman shadow boxing and the shadow won.

Evil lurks where disappointment lodges.

Being angry and resentful of someone is like letting them live rent-free in your head.

Nobody can do everything well, so learn how to delegate responsibility to other winners and then hold them accountable for their decisions.

Without appreciation and respect for other people, true leadership becomes ineffective, if not impossible.

Read the Bible; it is your roadmap through life.

As a child I was sometimes so hungry that I used to dream that one day I’d get locked in a grocery store.

I get up in the morning looking for an adventure.

The Internal Revenue Service is the real undefeated heavyweight champion.

Choose wise and Godly people to advise you.

That’s my gift. I let that negativity roll off me like water off a duck’s back. If it’s not positive, I didn’t hear it. If you can overcome that, fights are easy.

If you can maintain that integrity in whatever you do, you can’t go wrong.

I didn’t come back for the money. I just got sick of beating people up for free.

You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.

When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn’t afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po’.

In boxing, I had a lot of fear. Fear was good. But, for the first time, in the bout with Muhammad Ali, I didn’t have any fear. I thought, “This is easy. This is what I’ve been waiting for”. No fear at all. No nervousness. And I lost.

When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je’Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.

My youngest daughter sings. She’s going to be very good. She’s graduated from Music School and she’s been working down around and getting her feet wet, you know. I had her out with me for a year just showing her the ropes a little bit, but she’s going to be all right.

To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining ’cause she doesn’t want to go to sleep.

The elements of success. And my son’s very successful. He’s doing very well. And I have a younger daughter who sings.

You know, times change and the elements change along with it.

That, to me, is what I feel like is the future. If I have a daughter, if you have a daughter, becoming that ideal where it’s not about your gender; it’s about us being human, being in this together.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter.

My first novel, ‘The Tiger’s Daughter,’ embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man’s land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.