A golf course is for golf. A tennis court is for tennis. A prison camp is for escaping.

I’m as patient a father as I am on the tennis court. It takes a lot for me to get really upset, but sometimes kids can get you really cross if they really keep bugging you.

I have always believed that my job is to try and give my best on the tennis courts.

I think I’ve always had a decent perspective on wins and losses on the tennis court.

I’m only superstitious on the tennis court.

I am afraid of a lot of things. A dog. I could be afraid of a dog that’s upset, for example. And on the tennis courts, maybe on the outside I look fearless, but on the inside, I’m scared. There’s not one player in the world who isn’t nervous before matches. Especially important matches.

My first job was in sixth grade, sweeping the clay tennis courts at the yacht club near my house, which I was not a member of. Always had to pay my own rent. But I don’t really have any concept of how money works. I don’t know how much things cost. Like a BMW. Or a quart of milk. It’s embarrassing.

There are people who love you and people who hate you, but for me, more so, people only think they know me by how I act or perform on a tennis court.

I’m more in that Rafa Nadal high-energy high-octane mold out there. I wear that emotion on the court. That’s how I play my best tennis. People either like that or not. And I can’t change that: that’s who I am on a tennis court.

An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.

The fact that nobody played tennis in my family and you’d say by chance they make three tennis courts in front of the restaurant that my family owned when I was 4, I think that’s a destiny. That’s kind of life circumstances that kind of come together for you to become who you want to become.

It’s actually what I consider legalised cheating because one of the great senses that you have on a tennis court is your ability to hear the ball come off your opponent‘s strings [on Sharapova grunting

It’s important for the young players to practice other ball games as well, basketball or table tennis. On the tennis court, you can improve your eye through a kind of overexertion.

You don’t need to know who’s playing on the White House tennis court to be a good president

To me, Hewitt and Nadal would be the best spirited fighters I’ve ever seen on the tennis court.

In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water.

I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.

Tennis, imprisoned within fixed boundaries, a patch of an acre, a green rectangle, tries the human soul. A tennis court is like a coffin, only larger.

I grew up on the tennis court with lots of other kids. There were like 40 kids all afternoon and I was one of the youngest ones, so I always had to chase everybody to keep up.