Competitive Tennis Quotes

When I was 13, tennis became more of my life. It's when I gave up skiing, I gave up winter sports. I still played varsity basketball my freshman year of high school - basketball was the last sport I gave up for my tennis.

At the very beginning of my career, when I opened my business in Italy, I was also a ranked tennis player. I had won many tournaments. To be an athlete was my first choice. Second choice: designer. However! There was more money in being a designer at that time.

Tennis is so competitive. I guess that's the way it has to be.

Tennis is not really a traditional Olympic sport.

To have Serena in the Wimbledon final, I think, is the hardest match you can have.

I've always wanted to play Davis Cup. I love Davis Cup.

Professional tennis has become an extremely physical and unbelievably competitive sport. Injuries are the bane of tennis players, and it goes with the territory.

I never thought I was going to make a career out of tennis, to be honest, until I was 10 or 11 years old. One of my earliest memories is when I was seven, and I was competing against players that were three, four years older than me. I didn't take it too seriously at the time. I was having a lot of fun.

Davis Cup helped me a lot. Being in that great atmosphere and having the chance to hit with top 50 guys everyday, being on the practice courts, that gave me a lot of confidence.

Tennis is a young man's game. Until you're 25, you can play singles. From 25 to 35, you should play doubles. I won't tell you exactly how old I am, but when I played, there were 28 men on the court - just on my side of the net.

I like to play tiebreaks, as that is when it gets interesting. Even when I was young, I enjoyed these kind of matches.

I think when you can beat Novak Djokovic in the final of a Masters tournament, you are going to be OK.

Even when I was a little kid, I always dreamed that I would play Serena in a final of a Grand Slam.

The bad thing about the [tennis] calendar is how it is made and obligates you to play tournaments all year. If you want to achieve the most you can (and) go as high up (in the rankings) as you can, you have to play from the start to the finish because there are important tournaments from the beginning to the end.

I do like match play. I like trying to match an opponent shot for shot. It's a challenge. And it's something different.

Ivan Lendl was the best player I ever played. He was the first guy to bring the game to more of a power level and you could know that if he played really well you could get blown off court and that wouldn't happen against John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors or even Bjorn Borg or Guillermo Vilas.

But I still serve pretty big and that's one of my biggest weapons, so if my shoulder holds up and I can count on it, I can win a few matches and then you never know how the other guys are going to react to the fatigue and the length of the matches.

I was OK at tennis - good enough to beat Serena Williams, definitely... But no, I don't really like playing solo sports, so I don't think I could have got to the top. I was just decent. Maths is my true calling in life, which is bizarre.

I'm 6ft 7in and I was a bit like a giraffe on the tennis court, though I did play at county level.

I grew up in the USTA's junior circuit.

I knew I was the second-best tennis player in the state of Florida and No. 8 in the United States of America when I was 12 years old and I couldn't tell you what I was in baseball, but I liked my chances in tennis of getting a scholarship to college.

Since I was like eight, I always wanted to be playing pro tennis.

To beat Serena, she's world No. 1, so it's always tough to beat someone like this. She's never giving up. Even if she's losing, not playing her best, it's always tough to beat girls like this.

I wanted to work towards the four majors and the Davis Cup. I know to a lot of people it may not mean too much, but to me (Davis Cup) means an awful lot.

I think there's no reason the Davis Cup couldn't be as powerful and popular and profitable as any of the four majors are today, given some changes.