Rafael Nadal

I’d rather lose an argument than get into a long discussion in order to win it.

In Majorca, I can be myself. I go to the supermarket and the cinema, and I am just Rafa. Everyone knows me, and it is no big deal. I can go all day – no photographs.

I would love to learn other languages, maybe French? My uncle speaks German so maybe also German? Chinese seems to be too difficult.

My goal is to improve my game, stay healthy and be competitive. If I have that, I know I can be able to win tournaments, which in the end is what it counts.

If you don’t lose, you cannot enjoy the victories. So I have to accept both things.

I’m only superstitious on the tennis court.

The eyes of some of the fans at Davis Cup matches scare me. There’s no light in them. Fixed emotions. Blind worship. Horror. It makes me think of what happened to us long ago.

In your career you have a lot of good moments and bad ones. The important thing is to have enough motivation to keep working all the days with humility and trying to be a better player than before. I am going to try to continue doing this.

I am not the most courageous guy in the world outside of the court.

Every year I go to Broadway to see a musical – I like the music. I saw ‘Mamma Mia;’ I saw ‘Les Miserables;’ I saw ‘Phantom of the Opera’ like six, seven times.

I doubt about myself. I think doubts are good in life. The people who don’t have doubts I think only two things-arrogance or not intelligence.

Girls had never been important. I’d had a girlfriend or two and had liked them a lot but it wasn’t love, because my first love was tennis.

It’s more a tennis problem than a mental problem. The transition is difficult. It depends how much time you have. Playing on grass can sometimes be a bit of a lottery.

For sure, I’m going to play less matches because I think it’s very difficult to win the same number of matches as last year. Maybe I’m going to play a little bit less, but I like playing tournaments; so if I feel good, I going to play for sure.

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.

I love the crowds in Miami. I feel that is one of the tournaments where I get more support. That helps me a lot.

Our strategy [at Chelsea] is to bring up our own players through the academy, which we have invested a lot in, and hope it gives results.

The guy comes up to the plate, there’s always a chance where he can get a grand slam and everybody forgets about all the times he missed.

In the second, I told myself just to hold my serve and try and be aggressive on his serve, and hopefully get a break. I also applied more topspin on my forehand. Once I won the second game after being 0-30 down, my confidence also went up.

I’ve stayed calm when I’m winning and I’ve stayed calm when I’ve lost. Tennis is a sport where we have a lot of tournaments every week, so you can’t celebrate a lot when you have big victories, and you cannot get too down when you’re losing, as in a few days you’ll be in the next tournament and you’ll have to be ready with that.

Every time you are not practicing someone else is.