Boris Becker

“Girls had never been important. I'd had a girlfriend or two and had liked them a lot but it wasn't love, because my first love was tennis.”

“I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.”

“I believe that everything in life happens for a reason.”

“I don't really care what the man on the street thinks. I never did anything to please him in the first place, and I'm not going to start now.”

“How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?”

“I lost in the second round of the French Open and had 10 days off. I went to the Hard Rock Cafe. It was exciting to be away from my parents, to stay in a hotel. Hotels at 17 meant freedom.”

“It was a confusing time in my life, a really bad day at the office.”

“Where do you go when you're the best in the world? What's next?”

“The suit-and-tie job is very nice but it's not really who I am in my heart.”

“I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I Love to play.”

“When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.”

“I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn't thinking about the big picture. I didn't notice what they said on television, I wasn't reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.”

“So this is it. Match point for eternity.”

“That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.”

“The eyes of some of the fans at Davis Cup matches scare me. There's no light in them. Fixed emotions. Blind worship. Horror. It makes me think of what happened to us long ago.”

“I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.”

“An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.”

“A few years after my first son was born, he wanted to know how we chose his name, so I began reading him the story of Noah's Ark.”

“I believed in raising my children as I had been raised.”

“When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.”