I get up, get coffee, and go into my home office. I check email and Twitter before I start work, but I have to try not to get too distracted.
He thinks it's his day, and when you think it's your day, it usually is.
It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice.
What makes something special is not just what you have to gain, but what you feel there is to lose.
If you don't practice you don't deserve to win.
It's shocking how little there is to do with tennis when you're just thinking about nothing except winning every point.
Remember this. Hold on to this. This is the only perfection there is, the perfection of helping others. This is the only thing we can do that has any lasting meaning. This is why we're here. To make each other feel safe.
My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.
Learn to feel yourself in other bodies, to know that we are all one. Throw all other nonsense to the winds. Spit out your actions, good or bad, and never think of them again. What is done is done. Throw off superstition. Have no weakness even in the face of death. Be free.
Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security.
My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I'd see him maybe once a year and he'd always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I'd have to learn again.