“Basketball has been my life and I worked at it so hard because I enjoyed it so much.”

But it is a black man’s game, and it will be forever.

When I go to the line I’m thinking ‘All net.’ When I don’t think that, I’m likely to miss.

I just shoot until I feel good.

Practice habits were crucial to my development in basketball.

Whether it’s a tie game or down by 1 or up by five, it was always the same shot. So I always felt comfortable with the ball in my hands because it was in there a million times before.

I don’t think that once you get to one level, you can relax. You’ve got to keep pushing.

I’m a firm believer in that you play the way you practice.

I wanted to compete at the highest level again – and that’s the NBA.

I didn’t play against the toughest competition in high school, but one reason I was able to do well in college was that I mastered the fundamentals.

You never make any of the shots you never take. 87% of the ones you do take, you’ll miss too. I make 110% of my shots.

Leadership is diving for a loose ball, getting the crowd involved, getting other players involved. It’s being able to take it as well as dish it out. That’s the only way you’re going to get respect from the players.

Basketball was always a game to me. One of the greatest things in life for me was to be able to play what I loved dearly and get paid for it. So it was always a game to me and that’s how I perceived everything.

The best players will play. That’s the way it will always be.

I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.

Once you are labeled ‘the best’ you want to stay up there, and you can’t do it by loafing around.

I like being by myself.

It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.

Continents of memory had been lost.

If you can achieve that, that then it has been a pretty good game.

You will follow every mountain, sea and shore, You will see from far and near a world you’ve never seen before.

And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.

You never know what class you belong to unless you’re one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.

f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!

Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.