Quotes About Pressure

I spoke to my parents and my agent a year before Rio. I was like: 'I don't want to do this. I want to get away.' They said: 'Just grit your teeth for a year. Then you can have your break. And if you want to retire, you can retire then.' I was in tears. I just hated it.

It's always difficult, especially the U.S. Open, the last of the Grand Slams. It's always tough because you know, the season is very long. I really played a lot this year. Sometimes it's really hard to stay focused all the time because you're really tired after the whole season.

The whole Valentine's thing is fine, but you don't back it up right next to the biggest gift-giving holiday of the year. Unbelievable. And we find it acceptable.

My having won a gold medal in Beijing is not going to be an extra advantage. It does not have any bearing on how I perform in London in a year's time.

My family has been thinking of arranging my marriage for over a year now. At one point I too thought it would be fine.

Sometimes fans... they want more and more and more, and they think you win a national championship every year. It doesn't work that way.

I write pretty much year-round, but I definitely do more when a deadline is looming.

It's really hard coming of age in today's society, where society wants you to make the decision of what you want to do with your life by the time you're 16 years old. Most kids don't know what they want to do. How could they? They haven't lived in the real world yet.

You live for those pressure moments. Through an international career, you have ups and downs, but you always feel you are going to be tested in moments like that. It has taken me years to feel comfortable and to feel like I have good composure in those situations.

For seven years, I was in this fishbowl with this intensity, with all the stuff that went on with the Mets.

I always tell people that being the mayor of an urban city for eight years was like getting run over by a truck every day. There's inner satisfaction, but 24 hours a day, every day, I'm on duty.

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing all the hype that's written about you... Who knows? In a couple of years, you might find me in the loony bin!

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.

Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.

I didn't have traditional stage fright. If there was 500 people in the audience or three people in the audience, it didn't really make a difference. What made a difference was the conductor. Everything that I was scared about as a drummer was him.

My dad, coming from a very traditional family, always wanted me to be a doctor. So he would always ask me, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' And I'd have to say 'Dr. Chen.'

Totally, if I wasn't trying to be an actor, I would leave L.A. because you can't really have that life here. There's a lot of baggage that comes with being here, like the paparazzi, traffic, and all of it.

I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It's always one atom away from being a tragedy.

I find the female tragedy of insecurity to be hilarious. We get obsessed over issues like the tiny skin tags on our backs or that we're fat. You read one line in a magazine and it sends you into a tailspin.

A lot of young coaches who respect the fact I have been doing it a long time, that is often their question: 'Does it get any easier? Can you relax more during the games? Can you take it all a little bit more philosophically and put it more in perspective?' The tragedy is that I have to tell them, 'No. If anything, it gets worse.'

It got to the point the last time, at Texas, where every loss was a tragedy and every win was exhaling.

At Juve you were first or you were nothing. If we went out of the Champions League it was a tragedy. I saw team-mates who did not eat for a week.

This is the tragedy of the entrepreneur. They literally cannot slack off. That's why Alan Sugar looks so jowly, tired and angry, and Richard Branson so phonily, aggressively cheery.

I am not someone who deserves to be dissected and analyzed like some tragic example of everything that can possibly go wrong for a professional athlete.