Quotes About Commitment

Tennis has given me soul.

Tennis has been a part of my life since I was five years old.

People all the time try to take my outside interests and make them a negative. My life has always been like that and it always will be like that. I don't think it necessarily means that while I'm concentrating on tennis I can't put 100% into it. If I didn't have 100 different interests, I probably wouldn't be as good a player.

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

If I played tennis, I had to be in a dance class. I always had multiple activities, so I never had to count on any one of them to feel successful.

There is no shortcuts. Play your best tennis, give your heart out, and anything can happen.

At the end of the day, it is a very long year. The tennis season is pretty much ten months of the year.

After being on the court for six hours, being on TV is very glamorous and fun for me. But tennis is always going to be my priority. It's not going to be this thing when all of a sudden TV will get in the way of that.

I have always been very dedicated to tennis, and it's true that I made some compromises in my life. For example, I never went out to parties when I was younger, and I spent less time with friends.

My dad taught me how to play tennis, and I owe that to him. But the better you get, the higher you climb, and the more lonely you get. I've had to sacrifice a lot of personal relationships, but that's the choice I made.

In tennis, a lot of parents are accused of driving their kids into tennis. I would say I'm the opposite: I drove my parents into it. They didn't take it that seriously until I was about 11 or 12 years old, when they realised I had an opportunity to go pro.

It's important to understand that you have to dedicate time to your sponsors, to have relationships with the people and the media, but it is also hard when you are first coming up and your primary focus is on tennis.

After almost 30 years of playing this sport, I've learned something. I've learned that, no matter what happens, or happened... or where you are, or where you've been... at the end of the day: tennis is tennis. It's always, always tennis. And there's nothing better.

Tennis taught me what happens when you really work on something, and what happens when you don't.

I was watching tennis on TV, and between games, they were showing a commercial for a tennis school. I wrote down the number, gave it to my mom, and said, 'This is what I want to do.' She thought it was a joke, but I was very stubborn, and I kept bringing it up.

I think my progression with tennis has been pretty steady.

When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: Their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way.

My tennis skills are okay.

Because I've had time off, I've learned to appreciate tennis more - to put something back into it.

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.

Tennis is what I do and is part of who I am.

I'm really trying to focus myself on playing tennis, and I think that's really important.

I just feel like it would be so against my personality to have this struggle in tennis and just give up. I know it's not me, not who I am, and that would probably affect other parts of my life.

I chose to stay with tennis and they didn't understand that at the school.