The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.

Sports create a bond between comtemporaries that lasts a lifetime. It also gives your life structure, discipline and a genuine, sincere, pure fulfillment that few other areas of endeavor provide.

I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.

People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.

Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful at anything you put your mind to

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren't any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.

We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.

Do your best when no one is looking.

It also didn't take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn't for me, and that I wasn't going to go there to play basketball.

But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.

Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.

Are you brave enough to live your DASH: birth year – death year?

I've never slept with a virgin, but I love breaking the seal on a new peanut butter.

How do I tell you what my heart's been telling me?

I think if someone else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

It's fun, I didn't have enough money as a kid to buy a drum set, so I had to do something. I would mimic the sounds. That was it. And it worked. It worked for years.

As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

There are no great acts, only small acts done with great love

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?