When I said I retired from basketball playing, I have retired. You will not see me play again. That is a promise.
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.
I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
I look most like myself. . . when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.
Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.
My kids are from different countries, but there's an understanding, you don't have to like a country just because you were born in it. You need to respect all countries. And be very open to each other's, of course.
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
Men, believing in myths, will always fear something terrible, everlasting punishment as certain or probable. . . Men base all these fears not on mature opinions, but on irrational fancies, that they are more disturbed by fear of the unknown than by facing facts. Peace of mind lies in being delivered from all these fears.