I was very, very shy as a younger girl, just petrified of people. Tennis helped give me an identity and made me feel like somebody.
It's tough when you're No. 1. You don't have any private life, you can't even walk anywhere. I think that was one reason why I lost my motivation to play tennis.
Women's tennis is two sets of rubbish that lasts only half an hour.
People only see two hours of a tennis match where you're fighting and running and sometimes getting upset. There's a lot more than those two hours. Going out there and playing is actually the easy part.
When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there.
To stay interested in tennis, I have to mix it up with other things.
I always had a powerful serve. It's one of the best in women's tennis. It's very good to have a weapon like that.
In tennis it's easy to get greedy - and one Grand Slam doesn't feel enough any more.
As tennis players, you are never satisfied. We are greedy as players, always want better results.
I've been asked a lot lately if tennis is clean or not. I don't know any more how you judge whether a sport is clean. If one in 100 players is doping, in my eyes that isn't a clean sport.
As far as fitness is concerned, you have to enjoy it, do good exercises, and integrate them into your tennis practice. The preparation for the season is as crucial as doing good blocks when switching from one surface to another.
I love seeing tennis up close.
All my time in rehab has made me appreciate tennis more than ever.
To be a professional tennis player you need to put in these sort of hours.
We look for opportunities to play together including basketball, tennis, swimming, riding bikes and touch football. I try to provide a loving environment where we can play. I think that's good on so many levels - emotionally, for family interactions and, of course, physically.
A man should never wear shorts in the city. Flip-flops and shorts in the city are never appropriate. Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.
Tennis is seen all around the world; if I am home or anywhere in the country, United States, people will stare.
I used to go swimming and passed the tennis courts every day, and that's how it started. My mum said, 'Why don't you play tennis in your summer holidays because you have nothing to do except swim for an hour or whatever?,' and that's how I started playing.
You know growing up in Sweden meant we had a lot of rain when we played tennis. We were taught on clay courts but because of the weather, we had to go indoors a lot.
I certainly don't lose any sleep if I lose a tennis match.
My mother used to say, 'You gotta exercise.' She would really pound on me to exercise every day. She was very physically fit; she was on the basketball team in high school in St. Louis in the 1920s, when women didn't do that. And she taught me to play tennis, taught me to walk and run, and I ran for 30 years pretty religiously.
I like to play table tennis, spend time with my kids.
There are not many Irish people playing tennis!
Chemistry is really about two people who like to act together, I think. It's like tennis in the most cliched way. It's like if you hit the ball, they hit the ball back, and they don't hit it into the stands, and they don't put the ball in their pocket and walk off - and they don't argue with the umpire, you know?
I can be a tennis player, a golf player, and even a soccer player.
I haven't seen the film yet because I just got in from London. In the scenes where the two characters are bantering with each other, it is like bobbing at the net in tennis.
I definitely want to get out of tennis and try something completely different.
If you offer athletes stipends, then you're into pay-for-play, and that's the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn't in tennis. It wasn't in the Olympics. And it's not in big-time college sports.
With tennis, no one's going to give it to you. You have to be determined.
Not many people know, but my joints are extremely hypermobile, and that's why I'm more prone to injuries. That's why most of my major injuries were with the joints. I had a career-threatening wrist injury where picking up a fork to feed myself was a problem, and the thought of playing tennis again was so far from my mind.
I've been kicked in the teeth more times in tennis than the law ought to allow.
I have been learning English on the road since I started when I was 15, so it is a slow process but making some progress. Now I think I am much more comfortable with my English. However, it is difficult, still, when I speak about something that is not tennis.
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 played all kinds of sports when I was young: tennis, handball, basketball, some soccer. I focused on basketball when I was 16 or 17 and then came to the U.S. when I was 20.
I went to play in Brazil when I had just turned 18 and was the world's top junior player. I got to the airport, and no one knew who I was. I couldn't speak any Portuguese, and no one spoke English. Then someone said something that resembled 'tennis,' and I went with that.
Receiving the Newcombe Medal for a third year in a row is an amazing honour. The Newcombe Medal is a great occasion for the Australian tennis community to come together and celebrate our sport, recognise people's achievements and contributions to Australian tennis.
