I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn't do only tennis.

I was maybe only 13 or 14 when I started to play junior tournaments.

I think it was the right time for me to retire because nowadays tennis is too incredibly fast and you can say that my style tennis went out of fashion.

Seems like most of the kids today are into other sports other than tennis.

I would like to see it go back to the wood racquets. To see the touch put back in tennis.

If we can make some kind of adjustments, maybe in the game, to make it interesting and slow down the surfaces, then it will be more fun and more interesting.

You can fail many times, but you're not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

Things change after you die, though- I guess because dying is about the lonliest thing you can do.

There are so many different sub-societies inside of Syria.

Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavoury as gross sensuality.

A lawyer is either a social engineer or he is a parasite on society.

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.

12 of the best years of my life - It will never be forgotten.