“I can't play the game of basketball and live my life on what other people expect me to do or what they think I should do. That doesn't make me happy. What makes me happy is being able to make plays for my teammates, to be able to represent the name on the back of my jersey.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 930 of 4756
“When did I know I had talent? I think it started when I first started playing sports, organized sports.”
“But then I lock back in and I start thinking about how fun it is to compete during the playoffs and the first round, the second round, and Eastern Conference Finals. If I'm lucky enough to get here again, it will be fun to do it.”
“I started thinking about what it would be like to raise my family in my hometown. I looked at other teams, but I wasn't going to leave Miami for anywhere except Cleveland. The more time passed, the more it felt right. This is what makes me happy.”
“I learn from winning, because it's much easier to point out things when you lose. But I think the alternate competitors can point out a lot of things when you win.”
“I'm often a little perplexed, when I read a review of a book, by the quotes that are pulled out as evidence of excellent prose. I don't think great novels are necessarily composed of great prose, or that there's a correlation between beautiful prose and the quality of a work of fiction. A really good, interesting novel will often let a little ugliness get into its words - to create a certain effect, to leave the reader with a certain sense of disorientation.”
“I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.”
“I'm interested in dismantling the distinction between masculine and feminine writing both because I think it's a false distinction and, I think, ultimately an insulting one. It's as insulting to men as it is to women. I'm not sure what masculine writing would look like - I assume some combination of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Writing can't be gendered in that way.”
“When I receive a box of my books, my impulse is to hide rather than display them. It always makes me very anxious that they send so many copies, because I have to think of lots of different places to hide them.”
“To think someone can go out and sell something about you is really disgusting. I'm much more careful now.”
“Men seem to think that Page 3 girls are only interested in money. Money doesn't impress me at all. Not in the slightest.”
“I think Nine Inch Nails was a really big one for me, when I was 18. They really inspired me to start making my own music.”
“As a songwriter, I was really into pulling away from the melodrama and the overdramatic type of writing that I was previously always doing. I think over time my songs have become more and more restrained.”
“In political sense, it doesn't really matter what I do on my own, but it's so important to rally some sort of collectiveness and reignite a collective vision, and I think that's something you can do effectively through art and music, and through writing and entertainment - and just through like, pop culture. It's about spreading ideas and making people think differently, essentially.”
“The key to skeleton is to find the line, and I think I spend most of training figuring out where that sweet spot is.”
“It's really hard not to think too much. If I try to control the sled too much so that I have perfect lines, I'm really slow.”
“I think Democrats do a lot to talk the talk and don't do a lot to walk the walk on wage gap. I think Democrats like to make this a partisan issue and it's really not a partisan issue. Republicans are for equal pay and obviously have been on the record saying as such, and somehow the Democrats have created a false narrative that we are not for equal pay when in fact there's no truth to that.”
“As an American, we have a right to vote and to our freedom of speech, and to voice our political views, and so I actually take conversations on the other side of the aisle not necessarily as a challenge but as an opportunity to continue the conversation, which is I think what we all value most about America.”
“I think when a woman hears no, she takes it more personally than a man does. Sometimes you'll shut down. But when a man hears no - trust me, I've seen it - they just come back with another reason why they're right.”
“Even if the experience in my stories is not autobiographical and the actual plot is not autobiographical, the emotion is always somewhat autobiographical. I think there's some of me in every one of the stories.”