“The boys are so powerful off of the baseline now that they don’t have to come to the net to finish points. That’s the reason we went to the net. To finish the point. Nowadays, even the big guys can hit winners four feet behind the baseline.”

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.

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.

So this is it. Match point for eternity.

The fifth set is not about tennis, it’s about nerves.

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.

How fortunate we are to be able to see that. If he stays healthy and motivated – and the wonderful feel he has stays with him – he is the kind of guy who can overtake the greatest.

I didn’t start a war. Nobody died.

We have a guy from Switzerland who is just playing the game in a way I haven’t seen anyone – and I mean anyone – play before.

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.

Winning is a way of expressing yourself.

I haven’t lost a war. No one got killed. I just lost a tennis match.

I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you’ve gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman’s motherly instincts.

You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much.

Steve Dallas…a frat-boy lawyer who I knew in school. He’s never written me. I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which has saved me many legal fees.

I’ll confess right here that I secretly wish I’d have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.

Give a boy a dog and you’ve furnished him a playmate.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend.

Prior to being mugged I did not feel I had to carry a gun. However, I knew how to shoot a gun very proficiently. As a boy, I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time.

I was the boy that turned a girlfriend into the most celebrated lesbian on television. I got so much stick for that.