What is rewarding about the priesthood is, one, that you have an incredible privilege of being privy to some of the most extraordinary things about people. I mean, as their parish priest, you visit people who are sick, say, on their death bed and they tell you things that they probably have not shared with any other person. You are privileged to bring the Holy Sacrament to people at a time when they are probably at their lowest. But you also have the privilege of meeting up with people at their moment of great joy, when they are getting married, or when they have a child baptized.

And I acted when the actors didn’t show up. As the director, I knew all the lines and I took over more times than I wanted to. I didn’t know much about directing, but I was the only one willing to do it. Someone had looked around and said, “Who’s going to be the director?” I said, “I will.” I said that because I knew my way around the library. So I went to look for a book on how to direct a play. I found one called The Fundamentals of Play Directing and checked it out. I didn’t understand anything in it. It was all about form and mass and balance. I flipped through the book and there in Appendix A I discovered what to do on the first day of rehearsal. It said, “Read the play.” So I went to the first rehearsal very confidently and I said, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to read the play.” We did that. Now what? I hadn’t got to Appendix B. So I said, “Let’s read the play again.” That night I went back to the book and sort of figured out what to do from that point on.

It looked like an agricultural frame, something you might grow peas up – a lot of wires and cables strung from posts over a space the size of 57 tennis courts. It was actually built to study radio emission from quasars. I built the prototype and then six of us took two years to build the real thing.

We were training 12 to 15 times a week, 50 weeks of the year. I think sometimes people see you compete at the Paralympics or other amazing places around the world and think that is what you do all the time. There is an element of that, but a lot of it is just really boring and repetitive. The vast majority of your time as an athlete is spent on the road or in the gym.

I deeply regret not having learned a musical instrument. And I regret not having focused more on Spanish when I was studying it in school. I would love to be able to speak Spanish fluently and play an instrument.

I would end every night reading these ten letters. It made the numbers and the policies very concrete and very specific. And I was reminded that the choices we were making were affecting millions of people. I found that to be very useful.

Scooping ice cream is tougher than it looks. … Rows and rows of rock-hard ice cream can be brutal on the wrists. … I was less interested in what the job meant for my future and more concerned about what it meant for my jump shot.

I believe in this country. I believe in the American people. I believe that people are more good than bad. I believe tragic things happen, I think there's evil in the world, but I think that at the end of the day, if we work hard, and if we're true to those things in us that feel true and feel right, that the world gets a little better each time.

When I feel as if the people closest to me are happy and healthy and I'm connected with them, and when I feel as if I'm doing things that are making other people better and happy, then I feel real good. That's when I'm at my peak.

And finally, change requires more than just speaking out -- it requires listening, as well. In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois's first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement.