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.

I hate to lose more than I like to win. I hate to see the happiness on their faces when they beat me!

[In the modern game] you're either a clay court specialist, a grass court specialist or a hard court specialist... or you're Roger Federer...

Greatest thing in life: Winning a tennis match. Second greatest thing in life: Losing a tennis match

Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure, treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible.

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there. Spill your guts at Wimbledon and they make you stop and clean it up.

I never lost a tennis match, I just ran out of time

I am not looking to be understood or liked. Like me or not, I don't care. I am an outsider, that is the way I was brought up.

I hate to lose more than I love to win.

With everything else that would swirl around me when I got involved in it, tennis was my main concern.

Daddy loved his son. Daddy believed his son walked on water. Daddy, Mike had long ago decided, was an idiot.

If from Society we learn to live Tis Solitude should teach us how to die It hath no flatterers.

We moralize among ruins.

I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

Bill Rehnquist makes Barry Goldwater look like a liberal.

...the administration of the law can never go lax where every individual sees to it that it grows not lax in his own case, or in cases which fall under his eyes.

If [Donald Trump] really has an agenda to help, let him move forward with it. We'll see.

The US is to an unusual extent a business-run society, where short-term concerns of profit and market share displace rational planning.

It is our own arrogance and pride that cause pain. The more that we think that we can do anything, the less we realize our complete dependence on God, and the worse the pain becomes.

A mother's pride, a father's joy.