Every time, all the time, I'm a perfectionist. I feel I should never lose.

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.

You've got to take the initiative and play your game. In a decisive set, confidence is the difference.

My first U.S. Open I think was just very special for me because that was sort of the beginning of what was a 'Cinderella' story for me.

When I play, I'm boiling inside. I just try not to show it because it's a lack of composure, and if you give in to your emotions after one loss, you're liable to have three or four in a row.

If you're a champion, you have to have it in your heart.

Find something that you're really interested in doing in your life. Pursue it, set goals, and commit yourself to excellence. Do the best you can.

You can't give up! If you give up, you're like everybody else.

Competitive toughness is an acquired skill and not an inherited gift.

Whatever your goal in life, be proud of every day that you are able to work in that direction.

The difference is almost all mental. The top players just hate to lose. I think that's the difference. A champion hates to lose even more than she loves to win.

But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it?

I have the utmost respect and 'aloha' for black people - who have already suffered so much due to racial discrimination and acts of hatred.

I don't do a lot of dating. I guess it's kind of like everyone is always trying to set me up with somebody, so we go out and hang out at a club or somewhere. I think dates are weird.

In fact it was always the Communist problem which was responsible for the opposition to [Albert] Camus. It was always and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.

The gratitude ... should be commensurate with the boundless blessings which we enjoy.

What makes a person sexy is when he's not trying to be sexy.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.

The system is not working. That is how a paradigm shift begins: the established way of seeing the world no longer functions.

Every punch was thrown with bad intentions.

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.