There are times when your mind isn't ready to go but your body is, and times when your body is ready to go but your mind isn't. You try to get the two in sync as much as possible.

When I left Tampa Bay, I felt like if my career ended at that point, I'd be okay.

We don't even think about it out there. We just focus on doing our job. The ball is the same baseball, the game is the same game. We're going to just keep trying to do our jobs.

Like anybody else that goes and does their job, there's a way to do your job with excellence.

The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'

I think we've all been misled, at moments in our lives, certainly in school situations, and things like that, with getting with the wrong group briefly, or falling in with someone who we learn the truth about and no longer want to really be with.

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.