I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.

I would venture to guess that if I was a construction worker... who requested a transfer to another department for the betterment of his family I would be commended for it. But because it's sports there's just so much passion added to it.

I've always kind of had an interest in the drums but nothing else. The drums are the only thing I feel I would be good at because I'm a very physical person. I've always played sports and stuff. Drums would give me something to do.

You know we don't look much alike but Denzel Washington would make a great sports agent.

I don't think there's anything that is a greater area of discrimination against women today than the fact that nowhere in the world is there a female role model in team sports that more than half of a general audience would recognize.

There is no life for girls in team sports past Little League. I got into tennis when I realized this and because I thought golf would be too slow for me and I was too scared to swim.

I would love to be associated with some sports organization. I was a journalism major. That's kind of intriguing to do something in the political-commentary arena.

I'm not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn't good at sports I wasn't good at anything artsy ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd.

In the sports arena I would say there is nothing like training and preparation. You have to train your mind as much as your body.

If I weren't earning $3 million a year to dunk a basketball most people on the street would run in the other direction if they saw me coming.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that though full of a thousand reasons for weariness the least thing such as playing billiards or hitting a ball is sufficient enough to amuse him.

You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.

If you allow for a purely capitalistic society without any type of regulation at all you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything and then you'll have zero capitalism zero competition - it would just be one giant company.

Then I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So then I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us the way we moved next door to the American Indians.

Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers then society would appear very different from what it is.

We should like to have some towering geniuses to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.

In the 18th century James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

I for one would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

Society has to change but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

As I get older I think contrary to modern assumption but in line with the old Lerner and Lowe song that it would actually benefit both them and society if - to quote Professor Higgins - a woman could be more like a man.

As far as a truly radical conscience you have to take it as part of a larger thing that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts his own inclinations society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

Since I have come to America I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come but while living in America I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I would argue that we have a generation of young people particularly minorities who are no longer putting up with the kinds of things their parents put up with. They're much more self-confident. It's no longer acceptable to make fun of people because of race or sex. But it has always been present in American society.