“We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.”

“In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.”

“Because we're human. Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes. ”

“Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.”

“Once you've played for someone, sweated blood for them, won and lost games for them, then that person is transformed forever in your eyes. He simply isn't human anymore. He's something better than human, he's something stern and demanding. He tries to extract performances from your body that exceed your talent. He makes you more than you really are. He gives you a uniform, an identity, a feeling of brotherhood like you have never known before and most likely will never know again... All you can do for the rest of your life is feel gratitude that he let you taste the small dose of glory, a dose that really means nothing, but means absolutely everything to a boy growing up.”

“Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.”

“Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.”