I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn't thinking about the big picture. I didn't notice what they said on television, I wasn't reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.

When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.

I'm not a God, I make mistakes.

Where do you go when you're the best in the world? What's next?

I don't really care what the man on the street thinks. I never did anything to please him in the first place, and I'm not going to start now.

Tennis is a psychological sport, you have to keep a clear head. That is why I stopped playing.

I go to London, my favourite city in the world, and I feel at home.

How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?

So this is it. Match point for eternity.

The suit-and-tie job is very nice but it's not really who I am in my heart.

I believed in raising my children as I had been raised.

It's silly to say it about a tennis player, but I'm an unbelievable hero in Germany. And Germany needs heroes more than any place.

For a year, I had all sorts of weirdos coming on to me.

I lost in the second round of the French Open and had 10 days off. I went to the Hard Rock Cafe. It was exciting to be away from my parents, to stay in a hotel. Hotels at 17 meant freedom.

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.

It was a confusing time in my life, a really bad day at the office.

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.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

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.

I go to my favourite tournament, I talk about my favourite sport and it's just a great month of parading.

I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.

That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.

Does anyone ask their parents how they are conceived?

I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I Love to play.

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

I believe that everything in life happens for a reason.

I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn't thinking about the big picture. I didn't notice what they said on television, I wasn't reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.

If I go into a club now, all the blonde girls leave my corner and all the black girls come into my corner. It's as if I'm racist towards white girls!

I can't change history, I don't want to change history. I can only change the future. I'm working on that.

A few years after my first son was born, he wanted to know how we chose his name, so I began reading him the story of Noah's Ark.

I don't know how many millions of photographs have been taken of me.

Tennis is a psychological sport you have to keep a clear head. That is why I stopped playing.

The fifth set is not about tennis its about nerves.

I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I love to play.

There's a picture of the real Coach Gary Gaines in the book and he's sitting in the locker room after a game, and he just looks so much like Billy Bob, that we went to him.

I learned a great many things in the Marines that helped me as a football coach. The Marines train men hard and to do things the right way, just as a football team must train.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

It's not just about a coach telling you what to do and just following it unthinkingly.

The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.

So you get two good hours on the field about every day, you get about an hour and a half in the meeting room and that's pretty much all you need to thoroughly coach your team.

My coach was a great politician, so he did most of the work. He was good.

Nobody gives a crap about hockey down here - nobody. I coach kids' hockey down here and you can start to see the disinterest in the game here with the kids.

But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

I'm fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we've won a lot. I have some kids who haven't failed that much. But when they get to college, they're going to fail some time. That's a thing that I can help them the most with.

If I came in to recruit your son, I would tell you, your wife, and your son, that I will be the most demanding coach your son can play for.

When you coach as long as I did, you can't help but miss those Saturdays - dealing with the players, the game preparation, the challenges, the excitement.

But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.

Working with my new coach has helped a lot. I've been a lot more focused and I'm doing all the little things in order to get faster. It's been a total lifestyle change really.

I am a coach on the outside of the establishment and that works.