"To hang out in a gay bar or put on a sequined halter top makes me feel like a total person."

"The doors fly open when you're a professional athlete."

"If you're going to have sex, use a condom."

"In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged."

"This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is."

"For years the league has thought I've been on drugs. I would have burned out a long time ago if that was true."

"I can't begin to describe the amount of crap I've taken for being a lousy free-throw shooter."

"Wilt Chamberlain lied when he said he had 20,000 women."

"I felt like calling attention to AIDS. I had the AIDS ribbon colored into my hair during the playoffs in '95."

"I understand what rappers are talking about. I think rap is less about educating people about the black community and more about making money."

"I can score 20 points if I want to, but that's not my desire."

"I go out with white women. This makes a lot of people unhappy, mostly black women."

"You watch some teams these days and you wonder if they just met on the playground and decided to choose up sides."

"You can love me or you can hate me."

"I wear women's leggings under my clothes, but no lingerie."

"I want to do for rebounds what Michael Jordan did for dunks."

"The NBA's chosen ones think I'm setting a bad example? I think they need to look around and stop taking themselves so seriously."

"Fifty percent of life in the N.B.A. is sex. The other fifty percent is money."

"They didn't have a problem with me being wild and crazy when it came time to fill the arenas."

"The NBA believes if you play for a team and get paid by a team, you're the property of that team for 24 hours a day."

"I'm trying to find new ways to make this game more attractive."

"I don't feel anything when I watch Shaquille O'Neal play. I don't feel anything coming off him."

"I go out there and get my eyes gouged, my nose busted, my body slammed. I love the pain of the game."

"The people at the top of the league think they need to rein me in so I don't become another Michael Jordan, somebody they aren't able to mold and shape and make their puppet."

"With me, everything's right on the table."

"Death has always had a prominent place in my mind. There are times when I think somebody might kill me."

"There is so much hypocrisy in sports."

"Black culture is something I don't relate to much at all."

"I spent money, I slept with women around the league, but I always kept my mind on the game."

"Wherever there's money, there's drugs, so to say drugs don't exist in the NBA would be stupid."

"I couldn't care less if the guy I'm guarding has HIV. I'm going to slam him anyway."

"My feet are like gnarled old tree branches."

"I spent my whole childhood looking for an escape."

"At least 50 times. I've jumped off a building, jumped off a cliff in a car. I've been in bedrooms when women came in with knives and guns."

"I don't trust what this life has given me."

"I'm nothing more than a sports slave."

"I'm the basketball version of a gravedigger."

"I don't fit into the mold of the NBA man, and I think I've been punished financially for it."

"I think marriage and athletes is a bad combination."

"If I want to wear a dress, I'll wear a dress."

"Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something."

"I didn't want to be known as Madonna's playboy, her boy toy."

"When a high-profile personality lives like I do, everybody thinks that person is fated to die young."

"As long as I play ball, I can get any woman I want."

"A player dreams of being a superstar, but he doesn't want people flocking all over him asking for an autograph."

"I'm not one of those leeching sons of bitches. I want to earn everything I get."

"Everybody's talking trash these days, so why not keep quiet?"

"I'm hungrier than those other guys out there. Every rebound is a personal challenge."

"There's one thing everyone should understand: I like my character."

"For five years I've felt like the best prostitute in a high-class whorehouse. But all the other girls get paid more than I do."