Tennis Quotes

“I started playing tennis when I was 4 or 5 years old.”

“I did just about everything under the sun. I did some Revlon work, make-up artistry. I taught classes at community colleges for a make-up course, teaching tennis. I was doing everything I knew how to do. I think one year I had as many as 10 W-2's come in.”

“Growing up, I'd just be at home, playing tennis, spending my allowance on an ice-cream truck.”

“Tennis is not always that accessible but I sometimes think badminton is harder - tennis you can always play against the wall but badminton is tough to even play outdoors with the wind.”

“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.”

“Safin, in his way, is very talented. It is a joy to watch them play; it is tennis of a very high quality.”

“I don't play tennis at all.”

“I'm a huge tennis fan, so the game I play the most is 'Top Spin.' You really have to know how to play tennis to get good at this game - whether you want to hit a forehand or a backhand, when's the best time to hit a slice - it's so real.”

“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.”

“Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words — if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night — do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?”

“I would say, hand on heart, I probably had a very good relationship with the press. The tennis journalists that followed me throughout my career... sure, you know, we had a few bumps in the road, if you like, but that's what you're paid to do.”

“I've always been into sport, I watch all sport - I love golf, tennis, football and to me to box and have people in the arena cheering me on, I'll always miss that.”

“Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match.”

“Every good tennis player has to have a short memory. Good or bad.”

“I like to play table tennis, spend time with my kids.”

“I had an opportunity to hit tennis balls with Billie Jean King when she was in South Africa when I was 11. She encouraged me to pursue my dream, and I did.”

“Gender is irrelevant. Certainly the tennis ball doesn't know what the gender was of the tennis coach.”

“This is a dream from when I was kid. I'm playing tennis almost 18 years, and of course everybody's dream is to play the final of a Grand Slam.”

“Tennis is not like other sports where the coach is hired by an independent entity, and that makes a huge difference in the dynamic.”

“Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.”