Paul Pierce

A lot of people that I've had around me have been my closest friends since junior high, back when we were exchanging each other's clothes, staying at each other's houses. That was before I had anything.

Once people start making comparisons to a player of the past, they want you to be that player. I try to go out there and create my own image, my own style, my own type of game. Right now I can't even think of one guy I've been compared to.

As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.