If you work for it, you'll deserve what comes. Hard work.
I'm no stranger to pain. It's what made me.
I don't care who you are. You can be the smallest person off the street, or you could be the biggest person in the world. I'm going to treat everybody the same - with respect.
I don't try to be nothing I'm not. I'm not flashy. I'm just me.
You gotta be able to take criticism if you want to be anything close to great. Even if it's not true. You use that as an advantage for yourself. You can use that negative energy and turn that into an energy that drives you to be something more than you thought you could be. That's one thing I did.
We're all human at the end of the day. That's why I look at every person I encounter the same way.
I came up different; I took a different route. I want to lead my own path.
My mom always told me: Never make fun of anybody, because you never know what that person is going through. Ever since I was a kid, I never did. I never did.
Other people gotta be told when to go to the gym, what to work out, what to work on, what to do. For me, it was always my own self-motivation of maybe just wanting to make it out of Compton. I was like that with everything in my life.
I didn't want to be regular. I didn't want to be this type of player, how everybody else play. I always try to learn and just be better so I could be different, y'know, instead of being content like a lot of people I've seen were.
Me and my mom are just alike in every type of way. I talk to my mom about everything.
My mom's one of the toughest ladies I know. I've seen her lose both her brothers, both her parents. She's been through a lot, and to see her get up every day and put a smile on her face, that shows nothing but strength.
I am Toronto. Outside of where I'm from, I represent this city harder than anybody.
I never force nothing in my game. I let everything come whenever it needed to come. That's the beauty of it.
I don't care what shape, form, ethnicity, nothing. I treat everybody the same.
Growing up, I didn't have a lot and always wanted things. But I was too prideful to ask for anything; I always worked for it.
People ask me what I would have done if it wasn't for basketball. I can never give a good story because I honestly don't know. I had no other options.
I've never been one who wanted any type of attention, good nor bad.
At the end of the day, the only person to have a better Kobe sneaker game than me is Kobe himself.
Day 1, when I was drafted to the Toronto Raptors, they had this stigma on them: Every guy leaves. Nobody wants to be here. Superstars, nobody wants to play in Canada. From Day 1, my whole mindset and approach to the game, being in Toronto, was I wanted to change that whole narrative to that whole organization.
