Guitar Center hooks me up on a lot of stuff.
I feel like rap fit me better. I could hoop. I could have went and did that, but this is my lifestyle, my temperament, my mentality.
Coach Lue always amazed me. I'm like, 'How do you have this much joy coming out of life? You have money, but you don't drink; you don't smoke. All you do is hoop, and you live on a natural high.' But now I know.
I was a young kid, and the YMCA was my second home, where my mom was dropping me off for seven, eight hours. I'd spend the day doing what I love: hoop.
Yes, I backed the hula hoop. And I had a lot of other people come to me with ideas that turned out well.
I'd never think about not hooping. I'm always thinking about doing something with hoops or what can I work on today that's going to make me better for tomorrow.
It was more my uncle - my mom's brother - and my aunt who turned me on to hoops. He was more into basketball and he'd take me to Raptors games. And then my dad started taking me with him. And I started falling in love with the game.
I'm not gonna worry about what people think about me. I'm too busy. I don't give a hoot.
I like being able to, you know, pack up and leave the country and hop on a plane and go wherever I want and stay wherever and bring my friends with me and bring my family on vacation. That's amazing.
For instance, one big issue in hip hop is the gay thing. It's 2013, and it's a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It's crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip hop is small-minded or stupid - and that's not the case.
In 2008, I was one of millions united for hope and change. As 2010 dawns, change looks to me like more of the same. Instead of peace, we got more war. Instead of health care reform, we have an industry win that requires Americans to buy health insurance without any real cost controls.
Time is very precious to me. I don't know how much I have left and I have some things that I would like to say. Hopefully, at the end, I will have said something that will be important to other people too.
Love to me has meant different things at different junctures of my life. I'm not a hopeless romantic.
I've flown across America, I've scaled fences, I've stood under windows and gone out of my way hundreds of times. I'm a hopeless romantic. There's no hope for me.
My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.
I didn't really want to live, so anything that was an investment in time made me angry... but also I just felt sad. When the hopelessness is hurting you, it's the fixtures and fittings that finish you off.
Hopelessness has surprised me with patience.
People ask, 'Should I call you Sir Hopkins?' But I say, 'No. Call me Tony,' because it's too much of a lift-up.
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
As a kid I didn't see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn't do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.
