I wouldn't, a little bit frightened but throughout my life I'd learnt that when you're in the serious situations, you've got to try to stay calm. Because that's the way you get out of them.
People wrote me off, but I believed in myself. I got the confidence back, and it grew and grew. I won my first major and my last at the place that changed my life.
I appreciate a lot in this life; the things you cannot buy. Life is only once. I am happy being here and all the things that are a risk I normally avoid.
I love to sing. Seriously, in my past life I was Miley Cyrus or something. I swear I'm a singer, but I know I'm not. If I could sing, I would be the happiest person on Earth.
I counseled many returning missionaries. I interviewed 1,700 missionaries all over the world. My advice to them is that you should study and prepare for your life's work in a field that you enjoy.
I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It's not that I don't want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.
I really do love bluesy-jazzy music, so I love Etta James, B.B. King and Billie Holiday. I love that they have soul in their voices - I think that's something important is having.
I was very, very shy as a younger girl, just petrified of people. Tennis helped give me an identity and made me feel like somebody.
To be a tennis champion, you have to be inflexible. You have to be stubborn. You have to be arrogant. You have to be selfish and self-absorbed. Kind of tunnel vision almost.
Even though there are a lot of bright tennis players out there, you still have to protect yourself and save all your mental and emotional energies for tennis.
But that kind of falls in line; when you think about it, James Brown was a funk minimalist. All of those parts create a sum that's larger than than the individual parts.
So it's really hard for a horn player to comp. But I'm totally into trying to switch those paradigms around and find a little magic space where that works, and try to mine that.
You can never guarantee the wins but you can guarantee that you give it 100%. That way you can always look back and feel comfortable, as a player or a coach.
Once you win, you have no doubt that you can win. So you have gone through it once, and you can do it again.
I just want to get to the level where I can say that that's my level, just try to play well, get up there.
I had an instinct before and maybe now I don't have that instinct as much as knowing what to do, what shots to hit, where to place the ball, things like that.
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.
Billy Konchellah with his World Championship titles, Paul Ereng with his Olympic gold and Wilson Kipketer with his World records are my role models.
To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.
I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.