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My serve and my forehand I pretty much always had, but my backhand was a made backhand. I worked on it for years.

The thing about tennis is if you stay off for two weeks, or just for three days, you can lose your rhythm quickly. So it's just a question of constant diligence and vigilance.

I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.

Because a football game is just sixty minutes, but I'm training six, seven hours in every day. So, going for sixty minutes becomes easy. More importantly, I think that your muscles mature and can move in all different directions.

On the actual competition days, you get about three or four hours of physical exertion - between an hour-long warm-up, recovery in-between runs, the training runs, and then the runs themselves.

Preparedness for a game that usually lasts four-five hours requires good physical condition and also steady nerves.

It's not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it's what you put into the practice.

For an athlete, there's no time off... until it's over.

To be a professional tennis player you need to put in these sort of hours.

I used to play football for Real Madrid, and to be on stage for two hours, I can tell you it takes the same amount of strength.