If I'm still strong, I can still go and play. I can say I still have five more years. There are youngsters coming in so I think for them to come while I'm still active, it's a good bonus for the players and share what I learnt with the experience I have with those players before I step off.

My body is my work. You have to be patient. Maybe you don’t see the difference after a few months, but after a few years you will see why you can play longer and stay on a higher level longer.

The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is that you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.

I don't know what the future holds, but my game fitness is up to par and I've proven that I'm capable of being an offensive threat and also my defensive prowess, so it will be really interesting to see how everything pans out.

With each game I play, with each season I play, I'm running out of chances... you're never guaranteed next year. You're never guaranteed the next game. You have to seize the opportunity when it's there in front of you.

I've reached the pinnacle of my career. I just feel that I don't have anything else to prove. When I lose the sense of motivation and the sense of 'to prove something' as a basketball player, it's time for me to move away from the game of basketball.

I don't know how long this thing will last... We can still lose this war. That's a real clear statement. I wouldn't be a goddamned bit surprised but that we can still lose it. And then you can just write those casualties off and those ever-increasing names on those ever-increasing monuments... You can keep putting them on the monuments and giving out all this crap, all this posthumous DSCs and Purple Hearts... but there's no end to this thing.

Why should I be more ‘cautious, careful,’ as you say? I stay in the big leagues as long as I do because I play only one way. I know I take too many, maybe. I know I should not sometimes dive for the ball—or hit the wall trying to catch it— as much as I do. But you catch the ball, you help your team. You don’t catch it, you don’t help your team. I believe playing, how you say, ‘all out’ has prolonged my career. If a ballplayer starts loafing, he tends to lose that little push that is so necessary, so important. You get lazy, won’t take even the smallest chance; kind of lose interest. Your rhythm, I guess it is, gets all messed up. Fly balls start falling on you, when they should not. And you find yourself not getting around on the ball like you should. Once you lose this ‘little push,’ then it is awfully hard to get back in the groove… get yourself going again. Your ambition – desire – suffers. And you become the kind of ballplayer you don’t want to be.

If you don’t love the product, and you don’t love the team, you won’t go the distance.

Maybe I'm searching for some very hard or stressful things. I don't know. Maybe for me to stay in this sport I have to find out what is possible or impossible?

I don't know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like.

I want to go to the end of my job here. I built this team, I want to deliver with this team and I feel if I left I would have in some way betrayed my own beliefs. It is as simple as that. It was nothing to do with what Real Madrid has done. It was about Arsenal. I have a project here that I started three or four years ago and I want to reach the end of it. I could not leave this team at this stage of their development.

As soon as baseball becomes a job, as soon as I stop caring, as soon as the smile goes away, I'll hang up my spikes and do something else.

I know I can still play, but it's like I told my wife, I'm just tired mentally. I'm just tired,"