Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn't the real thing. If you weren't playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside.
There was never anything I wanted to do more than play tennis. Never once walked out there and thought, 'I wish I was doing something else.' Not once.
I think younger players probably just think they are who they are-they don't think about coming out. Unless you're number one in the world, nobody cares, usually.
I retired because I had a knee injury, my cartilage was wearing out, it was painful and I couldn't put in the four hours of practice each day that I needed to.
If you lived the doubles, as I did, which was very stressful, you are sitting down in a chair experiencing a match without being able to hold a racquet in your hands.
What is the single most important quality in a tennis champion? I would have to say desire, staying in there and winning matches when you are not playing that well.
No one cares about the Davis Cup. How many people know I won five Davis Cups and seven majors, but that I rarely played the Australian Open?
I think you always have, you know, new players. Every year you see new faces, juniors coming into the seniors. I was one of them at the time long time ago now.
When we want to reach a dream for the second time, you want it to come true, when you try so hard, you are so close to achieving it, it makes things very difficult to live with afterwards.
Sometimes I wouldn't give an interview because I didn't have the time or something else was more important. So they come up with a story which I don't think is always true, but they have to sell papers.
As we travel around Britain, I am convinced most of us cannot really appreciate what we are seeing. We take too much for granted, because it is all so familiar.
Marcus: No, that don't fly Ma. Erin Gruwell: First of all I'm not anybody's mother. Andre: No, that's not what it means. Eva: It's a sign of respect... for you.
Andre Baptiste Jr.: [Vitaly is seen grabbing a grenade from box] What are you doing? Vitaly Orlov: [his last lines] Something for Yuri.
Some musical directors have more chutzpah. They pick up the phone and talk people into giving. I prefer to call and say 'thank you' after the money has been contributed.
I have no way of knowing how people really feel, but the vast majority of those I meet couldn't be nicer. Every once in a while someone barks at me. My New Year's resolution is not to bark back.
I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.
But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.
The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the...
I've been asked a lot lately if tennis is clean or not. I don't know any more how you judge whether a sport is clean. If one in 100 players is doping, in my eyes that isn't a clean sport.
Golf can be tougher than tennis when things go wrong, because you can't explain things by saying that your opponent played better than you. It's a cruel sport in that way.
Fashion is very judgmental. It's something where you have to be careful. I have a long way to go before I can be a designer. I'd love to one day, but we'll see.
