Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.
Absolutely the worst thing about this job is the travel and being away from family. I have a wife and three wonderful children, the kids are all active in sports and it's very difficult to up and leave and miss them growing up.
I think that many black people thought this would be a wonderful and extraordinary thing, for a black family to occupy the White House. Not only black people; a lot of white people thought that, too, but particularly black people.
Sometimes I wonder if there is something about my family which invites violence. 'Is it envy,' you ask? I don't know... I've had so much, a son as president, two as senators, a son-in-law who's an ambassador... perhaps God doesn't permit that much.
People wonder if I'll always be a part of this family and the answer is yes. My family has a lot of good energy going in one direction and because of it, we get a lot of things done. That's why I'll always spend a lot of time at Camp Phoenix.
My business partner gave me a drone, a small helicopter you pilot with an iPhone, and also it has a camera so you can see what it sees on the iPhone. Great fun. I fly it outside in Portugal. It's wonderful to oversee gardens.
Everybody would love to be mayor of Chicago. If you look at what we have done over many, many years and where we are today and the commitment by the business community, the commitment by the not-for-profit community - all this coming together - this ...
When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was.
Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about something like a bus crash in Bangladesh that has no effect on us at all? That can be nothing other than voyeurism.
It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they want...
Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. W...
Having to go through an intervention and family counseling is a wonderful experience. I would almost recommend it to anybody. It opens a lot of communication, and it opens old sores, but once it is opened and hashed out, the rewards are far greater.
I am fourth-generation deaf, which means everyone in my immediate family is deaf. So I grew up always having 100 percent accessibility to language and communication, which was wonderful and something so many deaf people don't have.
Wonderful things happen when you turn 50: you change perspective. You ask, 'Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? What have I not done that I want to do?'
As I grow older, I have a growing curiosity about my other half. My dad did a wonderful job raising me, and I wouldn't change it for the world, but at the same time there is a growing curiosity about my other half.
I'm passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle.
I like to feel the butterflies in the stomach, I like to go home and have a restless night and wonder how I'm going to be able to accomplish this feat, get jittery. That hunger and those butterflies in the stomach are very essential for all creative ...
All the praise I received couldn't substitute for the praise I had never received from my mother at home. I longed for some wonderful man to come and save me from my life - but there didn't seem to be any, at least not for me.
I would drive home and see people wearing my No. 34 jersey and wonder why, because I didn't feel worthy of that. And all the time I just knew people were staring at me, talking about me everywhere I went.
When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'
I'm different, and I have to be a warrior to be that way. But I have had some success; I hope I have touched the lives of some wonderful people, all by being what I see as myself but some others people see as different.
