Bill Simmons quotes:

There's a tipping point that happens with soccer in which you just kinda get it. I was drawn to it because the best soccer teams play similarly to my favorite basketball teams - like the eighties Lakers or eighties Celtics - teams that emphasized teamwork over individualism and relied on passing as their biggest ongoing edge.

Our favorite teams bring people together, keep family members close, bond people from different generations. Some of the happiest moments of my life involve something that happened with one of my teams. Some of the best relationships I ever had were with Boston athletes that I never even met.

In 1994, nobody could have predicted 'Shawshank' would one day be an iconic movie - and believe me, that would never have happened if Danny Glover had been Red instead of Morgan Freeman.

First impressions matter more in basketball than in any other sport, and they can be savored only in person. Players can't hide behind pads or helmets, so we can stare at them, evaluate every move they make: running, jumping, walking, even ogling the cheerleaders. We can see every ripple and tattoo. If they're lazy, we can tell.

Our favorite teams bring people together, keep family members close, bond people from different generations. Some of the happiest moments of my life involve something that happened with one of my teams.

I am old enough to remember every Red Sox season since 1975. Baseball is long. Baseball takes forever. It's day in, day out, for six solid months - seven if you're lucky. Winning is always fun.

I started my Twitter account for selfish reasons: I wanted to have a place to post updates on my book signing tour and stuff like that. I never realized that I'd have so much fun tweeting. It's become the deleted scenes for my DVD of columns and podcasts.

We don't realize how much the NFL is quietly drifting towards flag football. During the '80s, part of the defense's goal was to put the fear of God into offensive players... that's fading away.

Brook Lopez had a better game than Deron Williams

Writing is like playing golf - you have to keep working at your swing.

I pride myself as being a very supportive parent. I go to my daughter's soccer games. I hit most of them. I try to go to all of them.

Leaders thrive when they feel creatively empowered, when they trust the people around them, when their confidence is swelling. Leaders make mistakes when they lose that same confidence, when they're fretting about their power base, when they're reacting instead of acting.

The hardest achievement in acting - in my opinion, anyway - is nailing a role that absolutely nobody else could have played. Pacino owned Michael Corleone... but DeNiro could have owned it as well. Who else, though, but Val Kilmer could have nailed Jim Morrison? Does anyone besides Will Ferrell pull off Ron Burgundy?

The best under-the-radar rivalry is Dodgers-Giants. I had no idea how deep that one was until I moved to California... that one goes waaaaaaaaay back, and both sides absolutely detest each other. Fights in the stands, fights in the parking lot, the whole thing. It's every bit as bitter as Yankees-Red Sox without nearly the same hype.

You always hear that tragedies put sports in perspective, that they prove we shouldn't care this much about the successes and failures of a bunch of wealthy strangers. I'm going the other way - sometimes, sports put everything else in perspective.

I think one of the great things about a football season is that you see teams play in all types of environments, and if you can't handle one of them, you probably don't deserve to win anyway.

I always wanted to create a site that was sports and pop culture. '30 for 30' had a big impact because I loved how that was about finding, empowering and working with these incredible directors, and I thought the same thing could work for writers.

Why should it matter to us when wrestlers are found dead in their beds or seen limping around on two fake hips? Why should it matter to us that there's a list of modern wrestlers who died before the age of 50 - many of them famous - and that the list is more than 70 names long? Hey, there's always another wave of guys on the way. Always.

Has there ever been anyone quite like Paul Pierce ? No.

Five days after the Tsarnaev brothers blew up Boston's most sacred event, and just 24 hours after one brother was killed and the other was caught, everyone decided that it was OK to play baseball at Fenway again. The game happened on a Saturday afternoon, preceded by an emotional ceremony and many prayers.

Coffee is the highlight of my day. After coffee everything is downhill.

When I was in elementary school, we had the kid who threw chairs, the kid who stuttered, and the kid who went to the bathroom on himself ... but we never had the kid who came in one day and started shooting everyone.

Anytime someone calls you and identifies themselves with their full name, odds are it isn't someone you want to talk to under any circumstances.

One of my favorite things about basketball is that you can't break it down into some sort of science that makes total sense.

I graduated college in 1992 and didn't reach a sizable audience with my column for nine solid years. If I had started ten years later, or ten years sooner, everything could have happened sooner, obviously. But if I had started fifteen years later? I don't know.

I always wanted to create a site that was sports and pop culture. '30 for 30 had a big impact because I loved how that was about finding, empowering and working with these incredible directors, and I thought the same thing could work for writers.

Don't worry about what other people are doing. Worry about what you're doing.

If you have a privately owned system, there's going to be monies leaving the community that will go towards shareholder dividends and high salaries. If you have a community owned, municipally owned facility, those extra resources are being reinvested in the community and they can be going to weatherization and other projects that are vested in the community.

The NBA and NHL have different agendas: The NBA is much more protective of its players and its brand; the NHL has less to lose, and it's in their best interest to generate buzz any way they can.

But that's the thing about basketball: you don't play games on paper.