Quotes

When Tom Ford asked me to consult for Gucci, I had never consulted in my life. I didn't know what consulting was, and look, we made something amazing.

I think when I became a grandmother my life changed a lot, and I think I changed personally.

As you get older, you see life is very short, so you have to appreciate more and more and to enjoy it.

For me, the most important thing is to get my body healthy and make sure I live a long life.

I've been through things in life that are way worse than a foot injury.

I've been through a lot, not only with basketball, but with life in general.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

There are more important things in life than boxing.

The most important thing in my life is my wife and kids, my family. Boxing is a close second.

Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

I never cheated on nutrition, I always had a really good diet and I always supplemented well - that's a massive factor in any sport. Even in everyday life, if people are just going to the gym recreationally, they'll have targets in mind and if you're not supplementing correctly or concentrating on your diet, you're wasting your time.

It might sound strange now from where I'm standing as a world boxing champion, but I harboured serious thoughts, at the age of nine, of putting my whole life into snooker. I remember being fascinated by the game, watching the likes of Steve Davis, and thought I would do it.

It's questionable whether I believe in God or Jesus but I do believe in a spiritual world and some kind of afterlife.

Number one in high school, when I was sort of entrenched in the street life, if you will, the major thing that kept me plugged in the mainstream was athletics. I played basketball throughout high school. I also played football, but I played basketball throughout high school.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.

Aficionados of Slow design and Slow fashion use ethical and green materials to make objects - furniture, clothes, jewellery - that lift the spirit and last a lifetime rather than one catwalk season.

Our obsession with speed, with cramming more and more into every minute, means that we race through life instead of actually living it. Our health, diet and relationships suffer. We make mistakes at work. We struggle to relax, to enjoy the moment, even to get a decent night's sleep.