I would rather be a member of this [Afrikan] race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century.

I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.

I have my own identity ... The whole Michael thing does drive me nuts sometimes because people won't leave it alone. He's bald, I have hair. He's almost 40, I'm 22. Seriously though, I wish people would let it be and let me just be Kobe.

I'd much rather people knew me as a good tennis player than as an aboriginal who happens to play good tennis. Of course I'm proud of my race, but I don't want to be thinking about it all the time.

You're trying to grow up, and you don't want to be like your parents, and that gets mixed up with being Korean... They brought their values from Korea, and I accepted them because I didn't know anything more. But as I grow older, I feel more Korean every year; it's very strange.

Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid, I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me.