“I’m not the next anyone, I’m the first Maria Sharapova.”

When I walk through that gate to the court, that’s my escape. I block out everything, good and bad.

I’d love to open a tennis school for children in my hometown of Sochi.

I’m not the next Kournikova-I want to win matches!

It’s easy to impress me. I don’t need a fancy party to be happy. Just good friends, good food, and good laughs. I’m happy. I’m satisfied. I’m content.

When I’m down or maybe when it’s close in the match, I feel like I’m still in it. I don’t feel like I’m letting down. Mentally, I’m still really, really tough.

When you’re going through tough moments, you never know when you’re going to have good moments.

My main goal is to stay healthy because when you’re injured you realise how lucky you are to have your health.

If I can create something that allows a woman to feel better – that is the true reward.

When you come off the court and you feel like you were losing the whole match, and all of a sudden you pulled it out, you know, it’s those moments that you feel you’ve trained for and you work hard for. Just lucky to get through.

That’s why we have journalists, for stats.

I can’t please everyone. That’s not in my J.D., you know, not in my job description.

I’m always that annoying person that pulls out the camera in the middle of dinner and starts taking candids.

I think when you have surgery on any part of your body, it’s never going to be the same.

Whether you win a match or lose a match, in terms of your emotions, it’s important to be pretty levelheaded.

As an individual, I take every match seriously, no matter who I’m going to play.

It’s always tough when you lose – you’ve worked so hard for that moment and it hasn’t gone the way you wanted. But you have to realise there’s always a bright side, you have to pick yourself up and get ready for the next game.

Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.

Whatever my fate, I’ll go to it laughing.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

I’d like to cut an attitude into clothes.

The true Mason does not hold or teach the attitude that, I am a Master Mason now and thus I no longer need to be concerned with using the working tools because they were given in the earlier degrees.

The knife’s edge that separates failure from success in life. That edge is your attitude, which has the power to help shape your reality.

As an actor, my attitude towards using of film versus digital is, if you have film, filmmakers have to cut eventually so you don’t have to learn all that dialogue. With digital, they can just go on forever and it’s a nightmare. So, I like film – nice short takes.

I have this theory that, depending on your attitude, your life doesn’t have to become this ridiculous charade that it seems so many people end up living.