To kids, I’ve always been more than just some big tough black guy. I train to be tough – I box and do karate – but underneath all that toughness is a tender man.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

I think I’ve really stepped outside the box in the way I try to train, eat, hydrate, the cognitive brain games I play on a daily or weekly basis to try to build up some durability within my body, within my brain, to be able to go out there and play at a high level at age 38.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

I had a good time boxing. I enjoyed it – and I may come back.

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

Basically it starts with four months of training, just basic stretching, kicking and punching. Then you come to the choreography and getting ready to put the dance together.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

In the ’60s and ’70s and early ’80s, the trainers would grind you, and eventually they would break something – they would break an ankle in ways that it would heal. It was just the way of the business, to ensure that you learned respect for wrestling.

I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

Talking to a player helps, but in our sport the majority of learning happens from watching another player. You pick up things like being punctual, being nice to everyone, making sure you give your 100 per cent even in training.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

I’m not the greatest; I’m the double greatest. Not only do I knock ‚em out, I pick the round.

I’m not who people expect me to be. I’m not Henry Kissinger.

I’m a child of God first. Before I became a celebrity, I was baptized a Christian.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I’m tough when I have to be, tender when I should be. When you find a really tough guy, he’s not a predator. He doesn’t have to prove himself. Guys who have to pretend to be tough, they ain’t. I’m tough.

If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it’s not religion, but you can train through education.

A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

My trainer don’t tell me nothing between rounds. I don’t allow him to. I fight the fight. All I want to know is did I win the round. It’s too late for advice.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

I convened the first-ever national training conference for prosecutors on how to promote and deal with hate crime issues in terms of prosecutions and also protocol for defeating the gay panic defense.

What I think is fair to say is that, coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith – something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

There are some teams and logos you see, no matter where you are in the world, and you know exactly who they are and what they mean.

As long as I stay in training and play well, I don’t see what objection there can be to what I do off the field.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.

I was being trained because I wanted to be a preacher like my father. I wanted to talk about Moses; I wanted to talk about God… I wanted to talk about the apostles, the disciples and all that.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

I’m Mickey Mouse. They don’t know who’s inside the suit.

When I won the Golden Gloves in 1960, that made me realize I had a chance. And when I won at the Olympics, that sealed it: I was the champ.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

Why did I become Jackie Chan? Mostly because I work very hard. When people were sleeping, I was still training.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don’t think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you’ve done up to now.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

I never have really become accustomed to the ‚John.‘ Nobody ever really calls me John… I’ve always been Duke or Marion or John Wayne. It’s a name that goes well together, and it’s like one word – John Wayne.

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.