“I love where I’m from. I don’t live there because of the circumstances, but all my family is there. It’s what’s inside, it’s not what’s outside that determines the culture and the feeling.”

My family and I built my whole career from scratch.

I don’t follow other players or the tournaments they play. I have my own schedule and do my own thing. I never really think, ‘Oh, I want to be or play like so-and-so.’ I just like being myself.

No matter what you study, the thing that you know best is what you grew up with.

I always have a Sharpie, because usually when someone asks me for an autograph, they don’t have a pen. I carry one in my purse, as well as in my tennis bag.

I look forward to the challenges.

Tennis has never been the most important thing in my life. My family, my health, my happiness they are more important to me. On court, I want to win. Off court, I want to be a better person. Tennis is a path to my future.

I want to be different. If everyone is wearing black, I want to be wearing red.

When you start from nothing, when you come from nothing, it makes you hungry. I am proud of where I came from and I know what I want. I want to win.

I heard endless conversations between my parents when I was going to sleep about how we would survive, how we would continue. All of them were about trying to make me better.

I’m done growing. I only grow when I put my high heels on now.

I try not to hit a swing volley and run back. So my swing volley is kind of that transition to the net. It’s been one of my favorite shots ever since I was young.

I help design my own tennis clothes.

Ever since I was young I loved making things and being part of the design process.

When I make a commitment I stick to it.

When I make commitments I like to stick to them, especially when I’m giving back to kids. Just giving them an example of what they can achieve. I love giving back to kids. It’s fantastic.

The more matches I play, the more confident I get.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

Right now it feels like we’re playing a role, like me and a couple of my friends, in where popular culture is going. That’s a very rare thing in a person’s life to be able to be a part of that. It’s a responsibility I take seriously.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

It is – last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man