Soccer and cricket were my main sports growing up. I had trials as a soccer player with a few clubs interested, Crystal Palace being one, but it was cricket which became my chosen profession.
Part of my growing up was always trying to make my parents proud and always trying to keep them happy. I think part of what held them together was my involvement in sports.
Playing football and rugby is the Samoan sport. It's part of the conversation at church. It's part of the conversation in their barbershops, in the grocery stores. It's what everyone is aware of and familiar with. They take a lot of pride in the beat...
I like Barack Obama as a person. He's articulate, he knows sports, his brother-in-law's a coach. He always has the athletes to the White House. But I don't know about some of his policies and some of these people in Congress.
People forget that I'm a human being, just because I play a sport that everybody loves. We're human. We're not invincible. We share the same feelings and emotions that people on the outside feel. I don't think people really understand that.
I've never been a fan of individual awards because football is such a team sport. There's so many things that goes into making plays. It's about teammates trusting one another and working together.
That's the one regret I have in all the years that I've played professional sports, that I didn't win a championship in the N.F.L. And that's why you play on any level of team sports: you want to win a championship as part of a team.
The one thing that scares me the most is failing. It scares me that one day I won't be at this level. But while I'm here and while I'm having success early, I'm trying to do everything to stay on this level.
Although I don't have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.
News has become entertainment. Once that happens, a whole series of horrific events start to happen, whether it's the lack of dissemination of something that can inform you or something that actually negatively impacts society.
I think comics should test people, I think it's our job to go too far. That way we know as a society what too far is. Where else are you going to hear it?
Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground.
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it's much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.
Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.
Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.
I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.
The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.
This is like the telephone problem - no one wants to have the first one. But we are seeing a lot of people who want some sort of technology to solve the spam problem.
