Monica Seles Quotes

Since I retired, I very much enjoy watching Serena Williams play. While I was playing, she was one of the toughest players I ever faced. Her ground strokes are so solid, her serve is one of the most powerful in women's tennis, and mentally she is just so strong.

I did realise more than ever, after the stabbing, that tennis is a business - a tough business.

Madonna has total control over her life, and not many women have that.

Tennis has to become everything to you if you're going to make it to the top. You have to live it.

I love new restaurants; I love trying out new foods.

I used to pretend that I was Tom attacking Jerry, who was drawn on the ball.

I'm 5 feet 10 inches, and whatever my whatever my weight is, that's fine. As long as I am able to move and I feel good, it doesn't matter.

If you look at tennis, the girls have become much more attractive; they wear makeup. In my generation, you were a tennis player. It wasn't like you had to look a certain way.

I have to live for the day, and not worry about or try to know what tomorrow brings ... if I've learned one thing from all that'shappened to me, it's that if you would know what tomorrow brings, you may not want to live it.

Tennis is so competitive. I guess that's the way it has to be.

It doesn't matter who is playing or how old they are. I just worry about what I can control. It doesn't give me more or less motivation.

For me, the biggest thing with money has always been independence - just the biggest.

Did you know that Christmas Day is absolutely the best day to fly? It is. No crowded airports and crowded planes. I always flew to Australia. That's what Christmas was for me - a plane journey to the next tournament.

I have this terrible dark side to my personality, which playing tennis keeps at bay.

I knew I used food to cope with emotions, but just knowing it wasn't enough to completely stop it. That's why I created the twenty-second rule: Before letting myself rip into a bag of junk food, I forced myself to sit down and county to twenty. Slowly. During those twenty seconds I made myself answer a very simple question: What was really bothering me? Almost every single time, I came up with the answer before the twenty seconds were up. The next question was: What can I do right this minute to help fix it? Do I need to call someone to sort out a misunderstanding? Do I need to get paperwork done? Do I need to run overdue errands? . . .By the time I came up with something that I could do right at that moment my urge to eat had subsided and I was tacking the underlying problem.

I am lucky to have advisers whom I trust.

I've always been a very private person.

I never really did Christmas before. Christmas Day? I mean - what's that? What's it all about? I was always flying on Christmas Day.

Life is not worth living if I cannot have pasta or bread again.

I think for me, food was a way for me to deal with emotional trouble.

You will never have great tennis champions from England because of the cold and dark, but most of all because people only care about the sport for two weeks a year, and then they're on to something else. There's just not a great love of the sport there.

Everybody has their story - at some point you have to say, 'This is who I am: Now it's up to me to become what I want to be.'

I decided that I want to live the rest of my life happy with what I'm doing. So when I play tennis again, I have to play it for the right reason. I don't want to play to get my No. 1 ranking back. I don't want to play for the attention, or to earn more. I don't even want to play because the world wants to see me do it, even though it's nice to know that the world is interested. I only want to play because I love the game, which is the reason I began to play at age seven in the first place.

I don't like salads: I like the strong food.

What I put in the stock market, I don't have to touch in my lifetime. I want to live off my bonds. I want to be that safe.

People think I must have been so talented at an early age, but I don't know - was it talent or hard work? Who knows?

Tennis is pretty unforgiving if you are carrying weight. You are expected to wear short skirts, and you are compared to all these 16 and 17-year-olds.

I'm about the present.