You know, I’m just 6’9 and 260. And just so happen to be very good at playing the game of basketball.“

I used to play a lot of different sports. Now when I look back, I understand that it really helped with my hand-eye coordination.

When did I know I had talent? I think it started when I first started playing sports, organized sports.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

As soon as I got out there I felt a strange relationship with the pitcher’s mound. It was as if I’d been born out there. Pitching just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Striking out batters was easy.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

As a professional athlete a lot is going to be said about you – but I just try to move forward and try to achieve my goals.

That’s what you live for as a sportsman. You have to put up a fight.

When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born.

It’s really annoying for me. That’s not what I’m playing for, to be the face of the NBA or to be this or that or to take LeBron’s throne or whatever.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

I have never cared especially for outdoor sports and have no desire to excel at tennis, swimming, or golf. I’ll leave those things to the men.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head – big darkness, soon come – but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them.

Maybe the ones burning my jersey were never LeBron fans anyway.

I have really been disillusioned with soccer in England.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

When I am playing baseball, I give it all that I have on the ball field. When the ball game is over, I certainly don’t take it home. My little girl who is sitting out there wouldn’t know the difference between a third strike and a foul ball. We don’t talk about baseball at home.

I’ve thought sometimes about what I like about football, and it’s playing together.

Black or white good parts are hard to come by. A good actor with a good opportunity has a shot; without the opportunity it doesn’t matter how good you are.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

I want kids. I want a soccer team, and I want a husband.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.

I’m in the game of spinning plates. I’m spinning a boxing plate. I’m spinning a Tae Kwon Do plate. I’m spinning a Jujitsu plate. I’m spinning a freestyle wrestling plate. I’m spinning a karate plate. If I was to put all them down and have one boxing plate spinning, it would be like a load off my shoulders.

If you’ve got a talent, protect it.

I don’t know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

I can’t play soccer, and I’m not a great swimmer. I won’t drown, but you won’t see me doing laps in a pool.

If I’d been born ugly, you’d never have heard of Pele.

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.

I grew up in a rural area called Vega Baja and I’m the first of so many talented people in this area to make it out. I take great pride to represent where I come from and I am able to show my fans, and everyone who listens and watches me, that anything is possible.

I like playing. I wouldn’t be a good coach. I don’t have the patience to be a coach.

Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what they had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

I had been playing for a while, and I asked Louisville Slugger to send me a dozen flame treated bats. But when I got it, I realized they had sent me a box of ashes.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

I am very happy to be signing for the best team in the world and especially proud to be the first Portuguese player to join United.

I’m really a normal football manager.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Football is all about fans.

When I signed up for BFC, then-coach Ashley Westwood wanted me to play on the left as an attacking midfielder. I was not sure initially but I believed in his vision. For the first six-seven games, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was like a headless chicken. But he kept backing me.

I focus on one thing and one thing only – that’s trying to win as many championships as I can.

Irrespective of whether you have talent or not, one has to work hard. Just being talented doesn’t mean anything; you can end up wasting it before you realize.

I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.

I had no future with the Dodgers, because I was too closely identified with Branch Rickey. After the club was taken over by Walter O’Malley, you couldn’t even mention Mr. Rickey’s name in front of him. I considered Mr. Rickey the greatest human being I had ever known.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

If you’re a human being, you can attempt to do what other human beings have done. We don’t understand talent any more than we understand electricity.

Some artists just ruin their voices because they don’t know any better.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

The more minutes you play and the more grind and physical play you endure through the course of a season, you have to re-charge and get your body right for the next season. Be in that weight room and conditioning and that kind of deal.

I didn’t get a lot of awards as a player. But they did have a Bob Uecker Day Off for me once in Philly.

My uncle played rugby, and my dad played football, and they used to argue which game was the roughest – and everybody agreed rugby was. It’s a great team sport, and to be successful, every person has to play in the same level.

My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent.