Rafael Nadal

I don’t have any idols, any heroes, nothing, no.

I became a player who goes to a lot of effort while training, who can rely on his will and his mental strengths.

In tennis, because of the way it’s scored, I don’t think that scoring one point out of luck is ever decisive in winning. But, of course, it depends on the moment.

I am not the most courageous guy in the world outside of the court. Being alone in the dark is something I don’t like.

I’ll never have a tattoo – I just don’t like them, and when you’re old they can look a disaster. As for piercings, I don’t like them on men.

I didn’t play a great match, but once I pass the first two rounds, things get easier. I’m used to the court and the conditions.

I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

You can’t cheat kids. If you cheat them when they’re children they’ll make you pay when they’re sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that’s finally when they’re old enough to stand up to you and say, ‘What a hypocrite you’ve been all this time. You’ve never given me what I really wanted, which is you’.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

The more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury.

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

When I was a little girl, I remember carrying my orange UNICEF carton with me as I went Trick-or-Treating.

Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart: And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren’t so good. We didn’t have any money. I never thought of the word ‘poor’ ’til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you’re not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents, are their most important role models.

The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak out side my house at dusk with a pair binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes.

We all acquire damage as infants and children and we work on removing those scars all of our lives. You won’t heal everything, but what’s important is the work.