Every man has a purpose, something special that he can do better than anyone else. Your work is to discover this, then give yourself to it. The extent to which you use your skills to add to the world determines your happiness.

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.

All I can tell you really is if you get to the point where someone is telling you that you are not great or not good enough, just follow your heart and don't let anybody crush your dream.

I don't have time for easy. Tennis is just hard.

You should never be defined by what you do, by the things you have; you've got to define yourself by who you are and who you impact and how you impact people. And that's the thing I try to get across to my players.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.